Todd Mundt

I like Mario Batali’s new show on public TV. I suppose if I dug a little deeper, I’d say I like Mario Batali more than I like his new show on public TV. But more about that further down the page.
Marcella Hazan and Faith Willinger are leading lights of Italian cooking, but I think declaring [...]

Chow.com is offering several cool video series for foodies, or the people who love food and don’t want to be called foodies. The video here shows the segments of the coffee episode, featuring Arno Holschuh from Blue Bottle in San Francisco. (The podcast version knits all of these segments together.) “Full length” episodes average around [...]

Grant Achatz’s cookbook has been released, and even if you never attempt a recipe, this is an amazing work of art. It contains more than a hundred recipes from Alinea in Chicago, along with stunning photography, and when you buy the book, you get access to an accompanying web site with more recipes and how-to [...]

Because I can’t resist plugging a few other restaurants we visited in San Francisco and northern California on our latest trip:

* Ubuntu: Amazingly good vegetarian (and vegan-friendly) restaurant in Napa, with Jeremy Fox (recently from Manresa) at the helm. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni named it one of the 10 restaurants worth trying outside [...]

It didn’t take long to figure out my approach to writing about our dinner at The French Laundry on Thursday. I’m not Ruth Reichl, so I can’t review it and call it “the most exciting place to eat in the United States.” Frankly, I can’t review it at all. But I can give you a [...]

Coyote Run Farm
Originally uploaded by toddmundt

Chuck and I did the Iowa Farm Crawl yesterday, driving south of Des Moines about 45 minutes to a small group of farms, clustered near each other, which supply much of our food during the growing season. Chuck knows some of these folks well, since he’s out the door at [...]