Housed in a former Lotus car dealership, Chinawhite of Greenwich opened this past weekend.  The preview cocktail reception Saturday night was filled with endless servings of their new menu, a see-and-be-seen crowd and of course signature cocktails.  The large 'garage door' windows in the front and surrounding white walls gives this restaurant a feeling of openness and fills the guests with curiosity for what might appear next from the glass lined kitchen. 

Jody Pennette and the CB5 Group opened their first Chinawhite in Purchase, NY just a few weeks ago.  They're the group well known for Lolita of Greenwich and Boston, Red Lulu of South Norwalk and dozens of other boutique restaurant projects.

I indulged in many of the new menu items they were sampling which included General Tso's Fish, Vegetable Spring Rolls, Chicken Fried Rice, Crispy Vegetable Dumplings, Chicken Chow Fun, and my favorite, the Tangerine Beef.  The presentation was also impressive - many dishes arrived in classic white 'takeout' containers with chop sticks.

If you're in Greenwich and have a hankering for a twist on classic Chinese food, be sure to check out Chinawhite Noodle Bar.

I loved school lunch.  Pizza, tacos, ziti…..I never missed a day.  It’s funny to think about how the food options in my school system evolved as we got older.  In elementary school the menu was extremely limited.   In Jr. High the options expanded due to the snacks available in the school store.  Then in high school everything changed.  There were at least three different options for your main course each day, along with a serious selection of desserts.  We didn’t have any outside vendors in my high school cafeteria, but I understand many schools now have partnerships with Papa John’s, McDonalds and others.  I can see why the ‘fast food’ option would be popular, but it makes me wonder about the impact this will have on the health of these children.  

In Jamie Oliver’s recent TED speech he launched the Food Revolution, a project focused on educating children about food and empowering people everywhere to fight obesity.  The speach inspired a number of new initatives to tackle this challenge, including Ann Cooper's TheLunchBox.org.  Her site is an educational resource that teaches schools and communities how to revamp the way they feed kids.

Ann, the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley (California) Unified School District, is now taking it a step further by partnering with Whole Foods to create The Great American Salad Bar Project.  Their goal is to raise enough money to install salad bars in 300 schools across the country.

I think this is a great idea, but I wonder if it will be popular with the students.  Would you have appreciated a salad bar when you were in school?  Did you have a favorite school lunch? 

Here is Ann's 2007 TED speech where she outlines some of the issues with the way we currently feed kids in schools:  

Do you remember the first time Amazon recommended an item that was spot on for you?  The recommendation system was a major differentiator for the site in the early days and it’s still a valuable tool for finding new books, electronics and more.

I’ve been fascinated by this type of suggestion functionality, also known as collaborative filtering, and often wondered why more sites don’t use it.  As we outlined in a previous post, we’re hoping to leverage a similar approach to help you decide not only where to eat, but more importantly what dish to order.

As cliché as it may be, developing a site like this poses a chicken or egg scenario.  How do you get the users if you don’t have the data to fuel recommendations? A few interesting examples of how others solved this problem include Google, Pandora and now Hunch.

Hunch is a recommendation site that aims to personalize the Internet by building a personal taste profile for users.  Basically Hunch works by combining a few key components:

1.    Your social graph – Hunch will pull information from Facebook and Twitter if you provide access.

2.    THAY (Teach Hunch About You) – The site will ask you a series of multiple choice questions that make their algorithm more intelligent.

3.    Social gaming – Do we do anything without earning some form of points or status these days?  Of course not!  Users collect points (called banjos) and badges by providing additional information and feedback.

Recently Hunch posted a fascinating breakdown of food-related preferences based on the user data they have collected so far.  They do a great job slicing and dicing the information and calling out some of the specific findings.  In this case, the data they have could be extremely valuable for restaurants as they build or evolve their menus.  They were even able to provide some validation for Burger King’s recent decision to test beer in a few locations.  

Check out the study and try answering a few THAY questions to see how relevant the recommendations are.  Also, let us know if you find any other unique recommendation engines that we should check out.

Image showing the correlation between french fry and beer preferences - from "A Network of Food Preferences" by Hunch.

Take this week for example:

On Monday I called up my favorite local sushi spot, Thousand Crane (or 1K Crane as my friend Sully likes to call it), and ordered the spicy tuna hand roll.

Tuesday I had the tuna from Angela’s Pasta & Cheese Shop for lunch and it was prepared like the traditional mashed tuna fish. Except everything at Angela’s is done with a twist so they added olives and a few other things to spice it up.

For dinner on Thursday it was back to sushi at 1K Crane, but this time I had the tuna sashimi rather than the roll.

Friday night I went to an engagement party at The Up River Café in Westerly, Rhode Island. The food was great, mostly app/hors d'oeuvres, and this time my favorite fish was prepared as tuna tartar. The brilliant move was individually serving this in porcelain spoons. Major points for presentation and convenience.

Running a close second for presentation (and number one for the fullness factor) was my dinner on Saturday night at Firefly American Bistro & Bar. Here I had the mirin glazed tuna, flash-seared with a spicy ginger/sweet soy sauce over jasmine rice and bok choy. If I’m really hungry and making tuna the focus of my meal, this is a go-to dish. I may even give this a shot in my takeout rotation considering the taste and close proximity to my apartment.

Now I don't eat this much tuna every week (and I should probably try grocery shopping once in a while), but amazingly after all that I’m still not sick of it. Variety, the spice of life.

What’s your favorite way to prepare tuna and who serves it up the best?