Rexfeng

Comments

Get ready to order FourthMeal with your smartphone. Taco Bell will today announce a new app that lets customers nationwide order food ahead of time and pick up their meal via drive-thru or by walking into the fast food chain. After several months of planning, the company has become the first big fast food player to offer mobile ordering at this scale and with two pickup options. Other huge chains including McDonald's have conducted pilot tests for smartphone orders and are likely to follow suit before long. Taco Bell is emphasizing that mobile customers will have access to every single ingredient on its menu, and the company even plans to offer some food items exclusively via the app. Special offers will also be integrated, and Taco Bell...

Continue reading…

 Today Motorola and Verizon are announcing the Droid Turbo, a new Droid-branded smartphone with a focus on super fast charging capabilities. Verizon claims the phone can get eight hours of battery life in 15 just minutes by using a special turbo charger sold with the phone. And beyond that, a fully charged Droid Turbo promises 48 hours of battery life. Obviously, this is going to differ based… Read More

On October 7, Sony released the racing game Driveclub for PlayStation 4. Today, October 28, the game still doesn't work as intended—and Sony still hasn't said a word about refunding the folks who paid $60 for it.

Read more...

We've seen beyond the greasy curtain of fast food and discovered how KFC actually makes fried chicken from the raw animal to the final product that gets put into buckets and double downs at their stores. It's basically like how your grandma would do it—except they use an infernal magic machine called "pressure frier."

Read more...

 Apple fans hoping Cupertino’s reality distortion field was going to do magical things to the battery life of its forthcoming Apple Watch had better reset their expectations to something far more average: the wrist computer will likely need charging daily according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Read More

Measurement Lab, an open, independent analysis organization devoted to measuring the quality of Internet connections and detecting censorship, technical faults and network neutrality violations, has released a major new report on how ISPs connect to one another, and it's not pretty. Read the rest

Don't call it a Cronut.

Dunkin' Donuts has finally figured out how to bring its definitely-not-a-Cronut Croissant Donut to American stores on November 3, roughly 15 months after introducing it across South Korean franchises, for some reason, as the "New York Pie Donut." The delay was just natural, explains the company; Dunkin' plans to be "selling a lot more of them than a single shop bakery" — one owned by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named — "so it was important to do it right." They were a big hit upon launch in Korea, so who knows?

Dunkin' says this novel pastry concept will sell for $2.49 and be covered in its Glazed Donut glaze, à la this:

Going cro-nuts over @DunkinDonuts NEW croissant donuts... "Hi, I'll take them all!" #cronut #mydunkin pic.twitter.com/eNeLmmqiyF

— Dinopoulos (@cdinopoulos) October 27, 2014

For future versions, the chain says it's "looking at" fillings and toppings — who knows, they could even rotate them on a monthly basis? No specific flavors mentioned yet, but chocolate is among those already tested in Korea:

In an interview, John Costello, the doughnut chain's president of global marketing and innovation, schools the AP on the "at least 20 years" bakers have been making doughnuts out of croissants, or vice versa, which is a paltry form of proof that Dunkin' isn't "copying a specific bakery in New York." The companywide name avoidance does start to border on parody, though: Asked how the Croissant Donut and Cronut differ, Dunkin's CEO Jeff Miller would only tell the AP he's "tried the product that you mention" and likes theirs better.

So yeah, cue the 31 Ways Dunkin' Donuts Went Out of Its Way Not to Say the Word Dunkin’ Donuts’ Korean ‘Cronut’ listicles. And not that they'd know this or anything, but the timing was pretty smart. The guy who makes that other "product" is kicking off his book tour for The Secret Recipes right now.

Related: The Official Cronut Recipe Is Out
Related: Dunkin' Donuts Figured Out How to Make Cronuts
[AP]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: knockoffs, croissant donut, cronut, dominique ansel bakery, dunkin' donuts

The Japanese retailer Muji has built a cult following by offering nearly any object you could want in your home for not much money and proportionately great design. Now, the company is offering one more item to its line of 7,500 housewares: Actual houses. And there's a very good economic reason for the ambitious new venture.

Read more...

 It probably goes without saying, but: carriers love them some iPhones. For anyone who comes into the store with an iPhone in mind, the two-year contracts pretty much write themselves. Carrier execs would rarely speak too bluntly about that fact, though; Apple is already chipping away at their stronghold (see: Apple taking app distribution out of the carrier’s hands, things like Apple… Read More

Remember when Walmart announced it was going to start taking video-game trade-ins? Well, now the retail giant's ready to sell them back to you. Starting November 3rd, some 1,700 of Walmart's stores will begin selling pre-owned games. And to take...

Apple Pay has only been live for one week , but Apple's already got some welcome news — according to Mr Cook himself, Apple's fledgling payment system has hit the ground running, and already overshadows other NFC payment systems. Score one for Cupertino.

Read more...

Apple quietly discontinued the iPod classic last month, just short of the iconic MP3 player's 13th birthday. Tonight, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained why the company decided to shelve its revolutionary device — it couldn't get the parts any more. Cook, speaking at this evening's WSJD Live event, said on stage that Apple no longer had access to the components necessary to build the 160GB iPod classic. You'd imagine manufacturers would still produce parts for Apple if the company really pushed for them, but Cook said when faced with a dearth of necessary materials, the company felt that it wasn't worth redesigning the venerable device.

Continue reading…

Peter Merholz, a lauded designer and veteran of San Francisco’s design services industry, published an interesting blog post inspired by the recently announced closure of the San Francisco office of Smart Design, as well as by the completely unexpected acquisition of Adaptive Path, a leading independent design agency in that city for many years, by…

Advertise on Subtraction.com.

The famous Midwest chain debuts tomorrow on Third Street Promenade.

SANTA MONICA— Steak 'n Shake officially opens tomorrow at 11 a.m., with the first 100 customers receiving a year's worth of burgers, fries, and shakes. Good luck with that line.

BEVERLY BLVD— Dominick's is rolling back prices on a mini Russian Standard martini on November 4 to celebrate its 66th anniversary. Get a mini cocktail for a mere 66 cents all night, plus enjoy classics by chef Brandon Boudet like meatballs, Italian wedding soup, and chicken marsala. [ELA]

Eric Slivka, writing for MacRumors:

In an effort to encourage users to adopt Apple Pay, Wells Fargo has just launched a program offering credits of up to $20 just for trying out the service. Wells Fargo credit card users can receive one-time $20 credits, while debit and prepaid card users can receive $10 credits simply by using their iPhone 6 or 6 Plus to complete an Apple Pay purchase on their cards through November 30.

That’s how much the banks like Apple Pay. They’re giving you money just to try it.

Filed under: Car Buying, Sedan, Tesla, Electric, Luxury, Ownership

Tesla Motors is offering an enticing deal for potential buyers who might not be entirely sure whether they actually want to own a Model S for the long term. A deal through US Bank not only lowers the cost to lease the EV but also turns leasing the brand's electric sedan into a long-term rental.

Curious buyers who lease a Model S are now able to return it in the first three months with no penalties and with the remaining payments waived, something Tesla is calling the "happiness guarantee." CEO Elon Musk announced the deal on the company's blog, and he said the payments were also as much as 25 percent lower because US Bank "has a much lower cost of capital than us." Currently, a Tesla lease starts at around $800 and can be up to $1,300, with down payments around $6,500. Tesla leasing is available in 38 US states (full list below).

Of course, there is a catch for the offer. If people turn in their Model S within three months, they can't immediately lease another one. Musk doesn't say how long the wait is.

The new leasing deal isn't a solution for those owners who want their Model S to always have the latest and greatest features. However, for folks who are on the fence about one of these electric, luxury sedans, the offer might prove too enticing to pass up. Of course, Tesla has a history of announcing lease details only to change them later, so we're not sure how long this deal will last or if it'll get better in a month.

Continue reading Tesla lowers Model S lease price, adds 3-month 'happiness guarantee'

Tesla lowers Model S lease price, adds 3-month 'happiness guarantee' originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 27 Oct 2014 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

We know what you're thinking: What the hell is a "graphics amplifier"? (Some of you smartasses are probably also wondering if it goes to 11.) In fact, it is what it sounds like: The Amplifier, a new accessory from Alienware, is a big ol' shell that...

Jason Koebler writes At least 20 additional American cities have expressed a formal interest in joining a coalition that's dedicated to bringing gigabit internet speeds to their residents by any means necessary—even if it means building the infrastructure themselves. The Next Centuries Cities coalition launched last week with an impressive list of 32 cities in 19 states who recognize that fast internet speeds unencumbered by fast lanes or other tiered systems are necessary to keep residents and businesses happy. That launch was so successful that 20 other cities have expressed formal interest in joining, according to the group's executive director.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did you know that some bars and restaurants use menus that are completely devoid of pictures of the drink or entree you're thinking about ordering? It's absurd. Not only should menus feature photos of what your meal could optimistically look like, but venues should consider borrowing a page from this amazing pop-up menu engineered by paper artist Helen Friel.

Read more...

Ron Shevlin, writing last month for Snarketing 2.0 on CurrentC:

Furthermore, let’s review again the impetus behind the MCX consortium. If merchants simply needed a place to push out more coupons and drive more business, they could have partnered with Google or Apple. But they didn’t. They set up their own payment processing capabilities, because the real impetus here is avoiding interchange fees.

Interchange fees vary greatly, of course, but it’s fair to estimate that, at a transaction level, the fee ranges from 1% to 5% of the transaction value.

That’s why CurrentC doesn’t work with Visa/Mastercard/Amex. The retailers are trying to create a system that cuts the card networks — and their transaction fees — out of the equation. The problem with that is that, as Tim Cook emphasized in the Apple Pay introduction, people like their credit cards. Credit cards are a lucrative business and a highly competitive market.

Retailers want to cut credit cards out of the equation; consumers don’t. For that reason alone, I see CurrentC as doomed.

Shevlin closes with this anecdote:

At last year’s BAI Retail Delivery conference, I hosted a meeting of CMOs from large FIs, which featured Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart (who is a member of MCX). I asked Mr. Scott why, in the face of so many failed consortia before it, would MCX succeed?

He said: “I don’t know that it will, and I don’t care. As long as Visa suffers.”

As Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept continues to publish secret government documents, some of which go beyond the initial NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, speculation has grown concerning a second leaker smuggling classified documents to the publication. After a recent law enforcement raid, that speculation seems to be confirmed. Yahoo's Michael Isikoff reports that the FBI has identified a contractor who may be responsible for leaking documents about abuses in the government's terrorist tracking system, as detailed in this Intercept report. According to Isikoff, the suspect's home has been searched and federal prosecutors in northern Virginia have opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

Continue reading…

The next time someone asks you to explain 3D printers, and why anyone would want one in their home, you can simply bring up this article and show them that without 3D printing technology we may never have had a T-Rex shower head.

Read more...

I have a soft, chewy, lightly pliable spot in my heart for most sour gummies, but today I'm here to talk about my favorite, the sour gummy ne plus ultra, the Sour Patch Kid. And any Sour Patch aficionado worth their citric acid powder knows this simple fact: not all SPKs are created equal. Here's where to get the best. Read More

"African" or not, it's still the same ingredients, people.

Just as it's a bad time to be a chocolate-maker named ISIS, it's inopportune to be a restaurant focused on Liberia, where Ebola transmission is widespread. And so it has come to pass that the owner of Mama Ti's African Kitchen — one of a few sources of Jollof rice and cassava leaf in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota — has been affected by Ebola sensationalism to the point, she says, that people "are even afraid to shake our hands.". Even though the Minnesota Department of Health has explained, in flyers and elsewhere, "you CAN'T get Ebola" from food, business has cratered more than 50 percent, she says, forcing her to slowly but surely introduce bland-sounding American classics. "Before it helped bring people in," Kellita Whisnant says. "Now it's scaring people away."

The real clincher is the sign out front, which Whisnant broke down this weekend and taped over:

For the record, Whisnant says, her "beef is from Minnesota." She imagines Mama Ti's has three months left if business doesn't pick up, by which point they'll have gone full American anyway, serving Buffalo wings and deep-frying everything. "On the menu next week," Whisnant says, "is Philly cheesesteaks."

[KSTP, KMSP]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: gone viral, ebola, food safety, liberian food, mama ti's

 Alpine has a new way to get Apple’s CarPlay in your vehicle of choice: The iLX-007. The new aftermarket entertainment deck supports Apple’s in-car software solution, which translates some of the functions of your iPhone into a format more palatable for use on the road, including Maps, Phone, Message, Music and CarPlay-enabled apps like the recently-updated Rdio. CarPlay is… Read More

Comments

They do make brisket slicing look a lot more awesome.

There are essentially zero American cities that don't mandate gloves for food-service employees in one form or another. Often, it's for staffers who handle food that isn't cooked (or cooked again) before it goes out to diners: raw vegetables, long-cooked meat served directly off a rotisserie, or even bartenders dropping citrus twists into cocktails. Of course it's for public safety, but it can also be a drag on staffers (who don't always wear them), many of whom think gloves are cumbersome, or sushi lovers, who recognize that gloves tend to ruin everything that's great about Tsukiji-fresh fish prepped by skilled hands.

Usually the gloves are clear, or sometimes blue, similar to what NYPD officers and EMT workers use. But a few chefs — led by the world of barbecue — have found a better glove. You may have seen the black-rubber variety donned by workers who power through the wobbly brisket at Mighty Quinn's and the black-pepper-barked stuff at Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook.

"Honestly I got them because I think they look badass," says Alex Stupak, who employs "FDA Medical Grade" Pro-NITEs in the kitchen at his just-opened Empellón al Pastor. But there are other advantages beyond the matte finish and relatively tighter fit that make for a stark image in photos: They're made of nitrile, a heavier material than standard latex, so they're less prone to puncturing. Stupak's are latex-free, which is good for anyone who's allergic. And they aren't powder-coated.

Daniel Vaughn, barbecue editor at Texas Monthly, says the black gloves are important to pitmasters mostly because they are compatible with the all-out messy business of barbecue. "I really think it's purely about aesthetics," he told Grub over the weekend, right before he judged the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational. Vaughn thinks the appeal boils down to the specific medium of meat cutting. "There are very few types of restaurants where you're watching the people handling your food, right in front of you," he says. Carving out behemoth beef ribs and setting down a flush of deckle on a sheet of butcher paper, after all, remains the opposite of tweezer food and $300 china plates with a golf-ball-size dip in the middle for a one-bite course.

What's more is that it takes tremendous skill to cut meat well — anyone in a barbecue restaurant who holds this job title literally also holds that establishment's food cost in his or her hands. Precision is important. Smoky fat tends to accrue on work surfaces whenever someone's cutting ribs, chicken, turkey breast, brisket, and hot links, and the best cutters have to work with a flair not unlike a close-up magician. The black gloves, of course, help with all this. Vaughn says that Aaron Franklin occasionally uses them to great effect at his world-famous Franklin Barbecue. As Vaughn tells Grub, "It's just cooler when they can get the black ones."

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: noticed, alex stupak, barbecue gloves, black gloves, gloves, might quinn's

Rob Rhinehart, the masochist behind homogenous food paste Soylent, is a quotable character. That's not much of a surprise; the man replaced a majority of his food intake with a brown liquid, after all.

Now that he's hacked food, he's turned his attention to "hacking water." Billions of people globally live without reliable access to clean water; the American West is in the throes of a historically devastating draught, too, which makes it a more directly relatable problem for Silicon Valley types with money and a penchant for disrupting things.

Rhinehart took on the 4 Liter Challenge issued by clean water nonprofit Digdeep, which just asks people to try to keep their water usage under four liters per day. And Rhinehart, being Rhinehart,...

Continue reading…

The NYC legend has been serving Hollywood for one year.

Welcome to One Year In, a profile that features restaurants that are just now celebrating their first year's anniversary. Here are their struggles, accomplishments, and future plans.

Frank Pellegrino Jr. has a hard time getting into his own restaurant, the East Harlem Italian-American legend Rao's. The classic ten table red sauce joint is notoriously finicky about guests securing seats, but to hear Pellegrino tell it, that's due more to decades of loyalty than any sense of exclusivity. People just love to eat at Rao's.

Following a bustling expansion in Las Vegas -- the first in the restaurant's now 120 year old history -- Rao's has come to Hollywood, settling on Seward in the old Hollywood Cantina space just below Santa Monica Blvd. The wood-lined restaurant is meticulously detailed to retain the charm of the East Harlem original, from the photos to the hospitality shown at the door. Pellegrino sat down with Eater to talk about Rao's first year in Hollywood, the trouble with exporting tradition and whether or not you need to book a reservation a year in advance.

What has been the plan for Rao’s in Los Angeles? What made you want to expand out here? There is no continuity to the growth of Rao’s. Everything has happened organically. And because of that I think it really demonstrates what Rao’s is about, and how it became what it is. It’s so much more than just a restaurant. Growing up there — I started there when I was twelve years old — it’s more than a restaurant to me. It’s my home. That’s the hallmark of what we do. Those folks who grace us with their presence, who walk through those doors, are not guests at my restaurant. They’re guests at my home.

Obviously with a name like Rao’s that’s been around for so long in Harlem, there’s a comfort, a familiarity. Was it hard to transition that to Los Angeles? You just asked the magic question. Believe it or not, the restaurant in New York, as comfortable as it is, there is so much energy there that defies the law of physics. I think our whole entire family has been trying to decipher it for the last fifty years. It’s just magic. The one thing that carries us through, and really I believe makes Rao’s special, is the hospitality, and the ability to embrace guests. And that takes time. It’s not something that happens overnight.

How do you balance that sense of tradition with a need to modernize? I think that today it’s very difficult. I think it would be foolish to try and predict what’s next. We all have ideas, and those serve as our intentions or inspirations, but it’s ever-changing. Just in the last 20 years, look at the evolutions that this industry has gone through. It’s like NASA has fueled it. And with that has come an incredible burst of creativity, and moving away from the basics somewhat.

In the evolution of Rao’s, we were never one to follow trends. The food that we've created comes from my grandparents, my great-grandparents, when they first came here and didn't have two nickels to rub together. So it was a lot of taking the very basics that they had from their homeland, and finding a way to re-execute them here. It has to do with the loyalty of home.

What was very fortunate for us was Mimi Sheridan, in 1977. She wrote about Rao’s, which was completely unexpected. On her last visit before writing the review, said to my uncle Vincent, "I’m going to be writing a story about you for the New York Times." And my uncle said said: "Please, keep it small." And he really meant that.

But the essence of what we do is still in between the food and the experience. Hospitality can’t be done through a screen. Hospitality is really about an interaction, a sharing. And it’s through that opportunity to share something with someone else, that is really what this is all about. It’s the catalyst for all of our metamorphosis and growth.

Have you found yourself changing that level of hospitality to suit Los Angeles? The reception here, I must tell you, was a challenge. How do you go from a small ten table restaurant in East Harlem, where I sit down with you and discuss the menu, to here? In New York, it’s 70 dinners, maybe 65 a night. And this location in Los Angeles actually parallels that in a lot of ways, and I'm proud of that.

From New York, we go to Las Vegas. After 112 years, that was our first expansion, and the dining rooms there account for 8,000 square feet. In New York, it’s 3,500 square feet, but you try and execute the same model in a 340 seat restaurant.

Now, when I’m here [in Los Angeles], it’s like I’m at a Thanksgiving, surrounded by friends and family. I want to stop eating, but I just can’t. And I think to myself, wow. All of those other facets of the business just fall away, and you realize that this is worth it. This is awesome. And that’s really how I feel about what we do.

The story with the New York Rao’s for a long time was the impossible reservations, the pre-paid tables. Have people just assumed that same exclusivity exists out here? I don’t think so. From my understanding, no, you might not need a reservation every night to dine at Rao’s in Hollywood, but in the next couple of months, you may well need one.

Let me tell you the hurdle that New York is for us, and I say that lightly; the restaurant is still impossible to get into. Myself and my role in all of this, my influence is so small. But that is solely because of the loyalty that’s demonstrated to the folks that made Rao’s what it is today. You walk into that restaurant any night of the week, and half the room has been coming there for the past 35 years, 20 years. Wow. I owe everything to those people.

You’re one year in now. Where do you see this place in five years? I can tell you what I would love to see. And I can’t guarantee it. But five years from now, when I walk through those doors, I get to sit down in the dining room with family members, new friends, people singing, laughing, having their own moments. I want to see their joy, their happiness. That’s what I’d like to see. That’s my intention, but I can’t do it alone.