Click here for the top picks for 2010

Join us for the hospitality industry’s leading education symposium and celebrate this year’s theme: inspiration and innovation. The day-long event includes internationally acclaimed keynote speakers (sign-up for our newsletter for keynote announcement), wine and food sampling, Chef demonstrations, panel discussions and business seminars. Don’t miss it!

Click here to buy your tickets now.

Arlene Stein on Terroir 2010 from GoodFoodRevolution on Vimeo.

Click to read the entire article.

Some of your friends are doing it. People who do it are in the front pages and web almost every day. Even President Obama is talking about it. So should you do it? Should you join the millions of people every year who take the plunge and start their first ventures? I’ve learned in my own years as an entrepreneur — and now an entrepreneurship professor — that there is a gut level “fit” for people who are potential entrepreneurs. There are strong internal drivers that compel people to create their own business. I’ve developed a 2–minute Isenberg Entrepreneur Test, below, to help you find out. Just answer yes or no. Be honest with yourself — remember from my last post: the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

1. I don’t like being told what to do by people who are less capable than I am.
2. I like challenging myself.
3. I like to win.
4. I like being my own boss.
5. I always look for new and better ways to do things.

<Click here to read the entire article>

“In 2004, Coudreaut arrived at McDonald’s headquarters, a sprawling, bosky campus in Oak Brook, Ill., outside Chicago. His kitchen, which is on the third floor of the main building, is the sort you would see in the back of house at an expense-account restaurant. It features granite countertops (requested by Coudreaut), a giant Wolf range that cost more than most McDonald’s employees make in half a year, and a salamander, a device that professional kitchens use to brown food before serving. (See more about McDonald’s.)

On the day I visited, Coudreaut was experimenting with some very non-McDonald’s ingredients: celery root, broccoli rabe, wild salmon, hazelnuts, candied orange rind. There was a huge pot of veal stock simmering on a back burner of the Wolf. He seemed to want to prove his culinary skills, and he did — he made a delicious lunch — but what does any of this have to do with creating food at a real McDonald’s?

The answer is that every great manufacturing company runs a crazy R&D department, a place where mad scientists get to fiddle with toys and produce one or two breakthroughs a year. Coudreaut and his staff of 16 consider approximately 1,800 ideas for new menu items each year, but only a couple — or in an atypical year, as many as five — make it onto the menu. Few stay permanently.”

Click here to read the entire article from Time Magazine

Click here to read the rest of this article

“It’s all too much to do: you’re sitting down at your restaurant table at the same time as trying to regale someone with a witty anecdote about the crashing price of oilseed rape, and before you know it you’ve ordered starters, main course, wine. You think little of it until the time comes to pay and the bill is equivalent to the GDP of an oligarch-free former Soviet republic. So why is it so easy to overspend in restaurants?

Click here to read the complete article from The Independent

Click here to read the article