Short skirts and dry-aged pork

Revealing the mysteries of the restaurant show

May 18, 2009|By Christopher Borrelli and Kevin Pang, TRIBUNE REPORTERS

Spending a day at the National Restaurant Association Show, which camps out at McCormick Place for four days each year, and wraps Tuesday, is a lot like trudging through an obscure forest thicket, dense with soda distributors and table lamp-makers and doughnut machine vendors -- any company with anything remotely to do with the restaurant industry. That said, the economy is lousy and that thicket was a bit less dense than in years past -- one entire exhibition hall, full last year, went unused this year.

The show, the industry's largest, is not open to the public, which is probably wise. It's exhausting and dizzying and enormous, and, so, without further adieu, we present: Mysteries of the National Restaurant Association Show -- revealed!

Mystery No. 1: Is the quesadilla Korean?

It is now. Saturday morning brought the unusual sight of Roy Choi frying quesadillas stuffed with kimchi at a booth sponsored by a group charged with promoting Korean food in America. Their weapon was Choi, whose seventh-month old Kogi BBQ street trucks have been an overnight sensation in Los Angeles. Choi, however, who grew up in California, had doubts about being here. In a cowboy scarf and sideways Dodgers hat, he spoke in a casual whisper: "Man, we're just a street taco truck and we are killing it. But you see that, I just handed kimchi to five kids from Ohio. Authentic. Straight from the streets of L.A. Korean street food. Those kids are going to Google 'Korea' now. They probably don't even know what Korea is. Now they do."

Mystery No. 2 What is a Tilted Kilt?

A Tilted Kilt is a Hooters-ish theme restaurant invented by a "restaurant conceptualist" from Las Vegas. (A new Tilted Kilt is tentatively set to open on Wabash Avenue later this week.) The Tilted Kilt shtick is that its waitresses wear microscopic tilted kilts and tiny white shirts. Two examples (or women) stood beside the Tilted booth, thronged by leering men. The Tilted Kilt has 21 franchises.

By chance, the next booth was occupied by Domino's, the once Christian-owned pizza chain, which has 5,000 franchises. The booth was empty, save Mike Mettler, who wore a pressed suit and sat alone in a chair, throned by no one.

"I'm not upset," he said, nodding to the Tilted Kilt guys. "They're nice, and they do tend to drive the traffic around here."

Mystery No. 3: Dry-aged beef, sure. Dry-aged pork?

The next thing in the porcine revolution? Minnesota's Compart Family Farms (which claims it is alone in the dry-aged pork chop business) was showing their Duroc-breed, two-week dry-aged pork chops, which are juicy, more robust and porky than pork chops, we told Four Seasons chef Kevin Hickey. "It makes sense," he said. "People are getting more flexible about pork."

Mystery No. 4: Why were grown men dressed as diseases?

Sanitation was a constant theme -- "All we are saying/is give germs a chance!" sang the postulate fungi outside the Sani Professional booth, a stab at counterintuitive humor.

We were more intrigued by Terraboost, giving away automatic hand sanitizers to any business that agreed to buy its sanitizing solution. They said they have been at work on these stations for two years. Asked if the company had anticipated the swine flu crisis, they moaned: "I mean, why couldn't it have happened this week?"

Mystery No. 5: Why is that man selling Sylvester Stallone's shorts?

Those aren't his shorts. Roger Gilchrist of Millionaire Gallery sells autographed paraphernalia to restaurants. When we enter his booth, he was selling signed Eric Clapton guitars to a restaurant owner. "Hang this in your office," he is saying, "hang that in the restaurant." The guitars and autographs are identical, except one is legit, one is a duplicate.

We asked Roger if the idea behind this (he sells wall memorabilia to restaurants) is to provide the illusion that an owner knows Clapton or Sly? He said, no, not at all: "It's so that some idiot doesn't throw a beer bottle through your investment." (Huh, hadn't thought of that.)

Mystery No. 6: Should I get my bottled water from 3,000 feet beneath Hawaii?

Of course. Surrounded by worker bees in grass skirts pouring plastic bottles of water to restaurant owners from Kansas, a salesman pitched Kama' Aina water, pulled from deep below the Hawaiian island (using a pipeline installed by the fledgling company) then bottled it. "It took this water 2,000 years to flow around the Earth," he said to anyone who would listen, "which it did in complete darkness. It is not touched by sunlight, so there is no bacteria." How was it? Cold and fresh -- quite watery.

Mystery No. 7: Is the three-sided crayon a sign of the apocalypse?

No. It is the genius of A.J. Mesalic, a Nevada businessman who says the idea arrived one day while eating dinner at Buca di Beppo. "My 2-year old kept rolling crayons off the table. I kept hunting for them. It was getting old, and I thought, 'There must be a better shape for crayons.'"

Eureka! The tri-sided crayon was born. (And they smell great.) Indeed, Mesalic's Classy Kid Products aside, one micro-trend at the NRA was the need to keep children from dropping things around their table setting.

Mystery No. 8: What is the latest advance in cheeseball technology?

The Hearts of Palm Risole cheeseball, courtesy of Starbites, a month-and-a-half-old company with ambitious plans to reinvent the much-ridiculed cheeseball for the American market.

For instance, according to Chief Executive Leonhard Korowajczuk, the Hearts of Palm cheeseball is filled "with the core of a palm tree trunk." His chicken-breast cheeseballs are huge in Brazil, he said.

He stood behind the table at his booth, his impressive comb-over not even as impressive as his cheeseballs, which are light but rich.

"This country thinks mozzarella stick when it thinks cheeseballs. We think it can much more. Besides, who doesn't love a cheeseball?"