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Tags: Jaunted Interviews / In-Flight Meals / Food Travel / Singapore Airlines / New York City / Airline News / New York Restaurants / → All Tags

From Famous Kitchens to the Skies: How Singapore Airlines Develops Their Menus

Porcini-crusted sea scallop with black trumpet mushrooms, yellowfoot chanterelles, leek, roman cauliflower and a frothy white wine reduction topper: that is what you are eating 39,000 feet up on a Singapore Airlines flight. And that's just the appetizer.

On Friday, we had the opportunity to stand back and observe as Chef Alfred Portale of New York City's Gotham Bar & Grill reviewed his newest menu for Singapore Airlines with the airline's chefs. This is their bi-annual tasting session, when the chefs trade ideas on in-flight presentation and preparation of some thirty meals that Portale has devised for the airline's US flights.

Curious to see exactly what the process is for creating an in-flight menu, especially one for the precise and exacting tastes of the passengers who fly in First and Business Class on Singapore, we took plenty notes and pictures as Portale and the Singapore chefs taste-tested an appetizer, an entree and two desserts from the upcoming summer menu. See the goodies after the jump!

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Tags: Food Festivals / Festivals / Events / Food / Food Travel / Florida Travel / → All Tags

Feel Free To Eat Them, Skin And All At The Kumquat Festival

We’ve seen food festivals dedicated to some of the more popular tasty treats, but there are some lesser-known foods that want a chance in the spotlight. That’s why we’re recommending the annual Kumquat Festival in Dade City, Florida for your weekend itinerary. We know what the fruit looks like—kind of like an orange—but don’t think we’ve ever had one. Apparently they are tasty enough for their own party, so we’re intrigued.

Kumquat festivities have been going on all week, but the main event is Saturday, January 30 from 9am to 5pm. There will be a farmer’s market to bring home some citrus souvenirs, antiques, live music, and even a car show. Of course there will be plenty of specialty dishes including the featured ingredient. Aspiring kumquat chefs battled it out earlier in the week in a recipe contest, so be on the look out for samples of the blue ribbon winning recipe.

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Tags: Adventure Girl in Macau / Macau Travel / China Travel / Twitter / Food Travel / → All Tags

Adventure Girl Eats Her Way Through the Fusion Cuisine of Macau

Have you ever wanted to explore the Las Vegas of the East, Macau? Sit back and count your chips then as we follow Twitter celeb Stefanie Michaels, aka Adventure Girl, as she explores this southern Chinese leisure town. Each day this week, she'll reveal another adventure. Join her 1.5 million followers on Twitter for more Macau conversation @AdventureGirl, and don't forget us @Jaunted!

Macau’s cuisine is varied and offers visitors a bevy of restaurants options to choose from. Foods like Portuguese, French, Asian, Arabian, American, Cantonese, and Macanese are just a few alternatives. From dim sum to burgers, Macau has it all! I find eating my way around a locale to be an excellent way to learn about a place, and tend to enjoy family-run restaurants the most. I feel it gives me a peek into tradition, and helps me to better understand the culture.

Macau does have a specific cuisine—an interesting melding of Chinese and Portuguese flavors called Macanese. Macanese cuisine is considered a kind of fusion cuisine, as many dishes are also influenced by African, Malay, Indian and Brazilian gastronomy. Food has also played an integral role in connecting the Portuguese and Chinese cultures over the centuries, and it has been said that Macanese cuisine is one of the first true fusion cuisines brought to Macau in the 1500’s by international traders bringing a variety of spices and recipes from their homelands.

After the jump, I explore some of Macau's traditional dishes

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Tags: Travel Contests / Restaurant Week / Food Travel / Jetblue / New York City / → All Tags

Happy Restaurant Week, NYC! Win a Foodie Fantasy With Jetblue

Happy Restaurant Week, New Yorkers! If there's a time when it's really, superbly awesome to be in New York and have an appetite for variety, it's during the biannual Restaurant Week. A feeding frenzy conducted formally, the celebration of gourmet restaurants actually lasts for two weeks— this time from January 25 to February 7—and features prix-fixe menus at a selection of the city's top eateries.

For the second time, Jetblue is getting in on the game by hosting a contest to treat non-New Yorkers to the delights of Restaurant Week. Enter their "More to Love Sweepstakes" for a chance to win round-trip airfare to NY on Jetblue plus two nights at a hotel (looking like either the brand-spanking-new Ace Hotel or the Hilton), and one paid-for meal at your choice of these three famous restaurants: Morimoto, Blue Water Grill or A Voce.

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Tags: Restaurant Week / Food Travel / San Diego Travel / San Diego Restaurants / Restaurants / → All Tags

The Five Best Places to Dine During San Diego Restaurant Week

Suite & Tender

Foodies will want to prepare their stomachs for a week of eating out with multiple-course meals on the cheap. San Diego Restaurant Week kicks off today and ends January 22.

The wintertime event allows you to test out the city's best restaurants for half-price or even better. About 200 participating restaurants offer three-course prix fixe meals for either $20, $30 or $40; we say do one of each! Here are our picks for the week's best grub..

After the jump, our Top 5 Picks for SD's Restaurant Week

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You Can Visit The First Waffle House, But You Can't Eat There

Loads of people remember visiting Waffle House through the years, and these same people probably also have several visits that they can’t remember. Regardless of your level of sobriety during your last breakfast stop, this chain of diners has made a name for itself across the country—especially in the South. To honor the restaurant, you should consider taking a trip to where it all started. After years of disrepair and a brief stint as a Chinese restaurant, the first ever Waffle House has been restored as a museum.

Waffle House Unit 1—that’s their corporate lingo—is now open for tours in Decatur, Georgia. You won’t find anything to eat, but you will get to see how the original diner was set up back in 1955. You’ll learn that everything was originally made from scratch at the restaurant except for Coca-Cola and Heinz ketchup. When you finish your tour you can tell all your friends that their sweet cream waffles were just 40 cents. Don’t worry, they still use half and half in the recipe, but now they’re just waffles and cost way more. The place even used to sell Chick-fil-A sandwiches.

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Tags: Booze Travel / Food Travel / Travel Channel / New York City / Drinking Travel / Bars / → All Tags

NYC's Underground 'Please Don't Tell' Bar Tells All

New York City's fave "neospeakeasy" has become mainstream to the chagrin of some of its regulars. Besides the amazing drink menu created by Jim Meehan, Please Don't Tell's greatest asset is its "secret" entrance inside the hot dog joint Crif Dogs on St. Mark's Pl. The phone booth entry not only makes patrons feel like they are experiencing something special, it has also filtered out those who weren't in the know.

Mixologist Jim Meehan has been well known to drink connoisseurs for some time but now he's bringing his talent, and his secret bar, to the forefront. Jim was recently featured on the Travel Channel and last week he made a high profile appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On the show, Jim spilled all of his secrets, like how to make one of his signature drinks, a Tequila Highball, and where to find his hidden bar.

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Tags: Restaurant Week / Restaurant Travel / New York City / Food Travel / New York Restaurants / → All Tags

Book These Top Five NYC Restaurant Week Reservations Today

Calling all foodies! We hope you've already booked a quick trip to New York City sometime between January 25 to February 7, because that's when Winter Restaurant Week will be in full swing, offering up prix-fixe lunch and dinner menus at some of the best and most famous restaurants in the Big Apple.

And although restaurant week has been around in NYC since 1992, the prices haven't changed for the menus since 2006, meaning that 3-course lunches are a set $24.07 and 3 or 4-course dinners are $35.

Reservations officially open today, although if you follow NYCGo as we do, you had first dibs on booking the best tables yesterday when they twittered a special link. And since we know that sluicing through over 250 restaurants to nail down a few choice reservations is tough work, allow us to help you out with our list of the Top Five NYC Restaurant Week Reservations...

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Three Restaurants To Help You Get Over The Closing of NYC's Tavern On The Green

After some time of struggling financially, running into drama with club promoters, and serving tourists overpriced food, Central Park's iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant is closing for good. It will inevitably reopen at some point in the future under new management, and probably with a different name and definitely with new interiors since they're auctioning everything off, but we could care less. Why? Because New York City is a town overflowing with excellent restaurants, a good lot of them miles above Tavern on the Green in quality and food and yet priced lower.

Don't let Kelly Ripa's sadness over Tavern's closure fool you; her family also treasures Serendipity 3, a tourist trap of a restaurant that pushes "frozen hot chocolate," which is essentially just a chocolate shake in a bowl; not to mention that the place has been closed in the past by the Health Department for rodent infestation.

We're kind of happy to see Tavern go, since it's closing means tourists will discover other restaurants and support those, and we've got three in particular to recommend.

Three restaurants to help you get over Tavern on the Green's closing:

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Tags: Food Travel / Holiday Travel / Arizona Travel / Events / Festival Travel / → All Tags

Add Tamales To Your Holiday Menu At An Arizona Festival

While your family is busy waiting in line to pick up one of those spiral sliced hams, there’s plenty of others picking up tamales for the holidays. If you haven’t added the traditional Mexican dish to your seasonal spread, now’s the perfect time to do it. However, if you are a little nervous to shake up your family’s tradition, just swing by the Somerton Tamale Festival this weekend in Arizona to get a taste of what you’re missing.

Things run from 11am until 10pm on December 19, and this is the third year that organizers have been running the party. It's a free festival, so don't worry about postponing all the Christmas chores for another day in favor of heading out to the city of Somerton. There will be music and other entertainment throughout the day, including mariachis and other traditional Mexican sounds. Later in the afternoon is when your vote will matter—that’s when festival organizers tally the votes for the Best Tamale Award.

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Tags: Tourism Boards / Travel Advertising / Michigan Travel / Food Travel / → All Tags

Michigan Trying To Rebrand Itself As Foodie Paradise

Michigan seems poised to become the second state this season to embrace a foodie-centric ad campaign, following Massachusetts. We were less than kind about the Massachusetts food travel effort, partly because it was poorly implemented but mostly because Boston foodie culture is stab-in-the-face obnoxious. This Michigan effort looks a little more solid, if only because they're trying to emphasize a localism angle that many will find attractive:

...The program's goals are threefold: to increase menu offerings of local products at restaurants across the state, boost sales and profits for producers of specialty crops, and promote Michigan as a destination for culinary travel experiences... 'There's a lot of good stuff happening,' Jones says. 'Restaurants all around the state are understanding the power of using and promoting local products... Our goal is to help all those people learn from each other...to highlight their offerings, and to give them additional exposure.'

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Tags: Best Factory Tours / Best-Factory-Tours-Map / Holiday Travel / Food Travel / Denver Travel / → All Tags

Watch Candy Canes Get Twisted In Denver

Become an informed consumer while still on vacation! Check out Jaunted's newest series of the best factory tours the world over.

Thanks to those radio stations that only play Christmas music, we’ve had thoughts of candy canes dancing through our head since Thanksgiving. Instead of just licking through a few of the sweet treats and drooling over some of the great holiday travel deals, we decided to do something about it, like take a tour of a candy cane factory. Right in Denver sits Hammond’s Candies, and they would love to show you around their place.

They’ve been making candy since 1920, and they continue to do things the old-fashioned way. You'll find more than just candy canes at Hammond's though; they have peppermint straws, clove pillows, and even some candy coal for those that have been naughty this year. Miles of ribbon candy including bunches formed into snowflakes are flowing through the factory now until the big day later this month.

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