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Spin Me Right Round
If you’ve always dreamed of owning a revolving restaurant, you’re in luck: The Roma, in Durban, South Africa, is about to go up on the auction block. Looking at this kitschy jewel of architecture made me curious about who invented rotating restaurants. One Internet search later, and up came a fantastic feature by Tom Vanderbilt that ran in Metropolis Magazine 10 years ago. It tells you just about everything you’d want to know about spinning eateries. Turns out the very first one was La Ronde in Honolulu, which was designed by John Graham in 1961. But it was Graham’s second revolving restaurant that caught the imagination of the public: The Eye of the Needle (now called Sky City), atop Seattle’s Space Needle. Vanderbilt writes:
The Space Needle put the revolving restaurant on the map. Suddenly, every city was clamoring for one of Graham’s patented revolving restaurants (or perhaps someone else’s: Rod Kirkwood, an engineer who worked with Graham, says, ‘We learned fairly early on that a patent didn’t keep somebody from doing what we had done’). The revolving restaurant became not just a big tourist draw but a must-have weapon in the civic arsenal of every latter-day Babbitt: revolving restaurants were the riverboat casinos of the Sixties and Seventies.
Serious Eats tracked down another great article on the subject, this one in Invention & Technology Magazine, which addresses the engineering challenges of making a restaurant rotate—as well as the challenges to waitstaff:
Harry Mullikin, who was in charge of setting up the restaurant, commented, ‘When the waitress went into the kitchen she would come back out with no idea where her table had gone. Guests had the same problem. They would get up to go to the restroom but when they came back they couldn’t find their tables.’ The dining area was eventually divided into four zones, with a color code for each. That still didn’t help guests who discovered that the purses and bags they had left on the stationary windowsills by their tables were no longer there.
A recent Dallas Morning New article claims that rotating restaurants are back in vogue. So get those auction estimates ready; don’t let opportunity sail past you like a purse on a window sill.
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Tagged with: space needle, la ronde, sky city, the roma, south africa, honolulu, john graham, tom vanderbilt, rotating restaurants, revolving restaurants, eye of the needle, metropolis magazine, serious eats, dallas morning news, the grinder, media
Excuse Me, Any Salmonella in Your Truck?
The average amount of time that commercial trucks take to clear customs at the United States/Mexico border? Less than a minute. That’s according to a story in the Dallas Morning News, which takes a lengthy look at the overworked, underfunded world of food safety inspection. There’s simply no way to inspect the growing amount of food that crosses the border, which is why the government’s now proposing to put “more emphasis on inspections in the countries of origin” (an idea that was floated last December amid the flood of China recalls). That same proposal would, finally, give the FDA the power to issue mandatory recalls, something the agency currently can only do voluntarily.
As the Morning News notes, the bigger recalls last year actually came from domestic, not foreign, producers. But it seems obvious that with incidents like the following, the system needs to be tweaked:
In December, officials took a sample for testing from a 5,500-pound load of Mexican basil moving through the Otay Mesa border crossing in San Diego. The basil continued on to its destination and was sold to restaurants and other customers in California, Texas and Illinois the next day.
When the test results came back two weeks later, they suggested salmonella contamination, sparking a late recall.
Not the ideal sequence of events.
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Tagged with: food safety, inspection, china, mexico, dallas morning news, environment, food poisoning, fda, the grinder, green, media
Weight Loss Pays Off
A couple of weeks ago, Mayor Gianluca Buonanno of Italy’s Varallo Sesia offered a reward of 50 euros to any overweight locals who could drop 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) in one month. If the dieters can keep the weight off for five months, they’ll be awarded an additional 100 euros. Italian Health Minister Livia Turco hopes that other towns will follow this example. According to BBC News:
28 million Italians are overweight—almost half the population—with five million people officially classified as obese.
Apparently, lots of people have already signed up for this weight-loss challenge, but would the same ploy work here in America? Well, Elsa Simcik, a lifestyles columnist for the Dallas Morning News, makes some interesting points in her column about the cost of staying thin. Dropping pounds means eating healthier, but it doesn’t necessarily mean buying less food. Simcik asks:
Should I spring for Corner Bakery or save with McDonald’s dollar menu?
Splurge on organic or go ahead and eat preservative-filled produce? …And it doesn’t stop with food. Being skinny can add up in other ways. There’s the gigantic gym membership, possibly a personal trainer, Zone meals delivered to your door.
While monetary incentives for weight loss seem like a great idea, the truth is that 50 euros (or $68 and change) is hardly enough to cover a good pair of walking shoes.
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Tagged with: italy, diet, weight loss, bbc news, dallas morning news, gianluca buonanno, varallo sesia, livia turco, the grinder, media
