Out here in the SF Bay Area it is a HUGE thing to take photos of your food. Except for the cheapest greasy spoons, I'm almost never in a restaurant where I don't see someone snapping photos with their cell phones. Since we go out a lot (3-4x/week) at all price levels, it is far from unusual. The more the meal costs, the more flashes are going off, every night. Taking food photos too often goes way beyond the "you two pose together so I can get a shot". People get up from their seats, walk around the table, not even noticing that they are in the way of the waitstaff. The tendency of most restaurateurs to cram in as many tables as possible doesn't help, either. Speaking as a customer, it is one thing to have a small cellphone flash go off. It is another thing entirely for someone to pull out a full-sized digital SLR and start taking flash pictures 2' away from you as you are trying to dine. Nothing like looking up at the wrong moment and getting a massive flash in your eyes as a stranger angles to get a shot of his 2" square of sea bass. Check the restaurant reviews on Yelp and you will find endless shots of food, often the same dishes, posted by various people. I have not yet seen the "stand on a chair" diner but I'm sure I will eventually! I don't mind low-key picture taking. I do it myself, and find it useful to see photos of food before deciding if I want to try a new place (of which there are thousands, where we live). But modern life shows us that there are too many people who go over the line and make it uncomfortable/unpleasant for others, and they simply don't care. If you as a restaurateur want to stop them, then you pretty much have to stop everyone from taking photos. When you get to the high-end restaurants, they don't usually have the same dishes anyway from week to week (sometimes day to day), so any photo is just a general representation of what the food will be like. In that case, a short slideshow on the restaurant's website more than suffices, and more restaurateurs should do that, IMHO.

Thank you everyone. Actually I am not sure if that dinner was for Easter or for Passover. LOL! John, that was done using a torch. I have done crisping the outside using the pan and the oven as well. It all depends on the end results I want. Those pearls are tapioca pearls. They come in small and big like the ones in the pictures. They really make the wild rice dish special both in appearance and in taste. In contrast, wild rice is completely loose without any starch to bind them together, which is kind of nice. In this dish, the tapioca gave the wild rice a little starch and that gave the wild rice more like regular rice in mouth feel, which was interesting also. Annie, that's shaved dark chocolate power on the strawberries. I had a separate dish with chocolate shavings that people can dip the strawberries in. This way it's up to each to decide how much chocolate to put on. The green stuff is just home grown alfalfa sprouts. You can use different shape containers to sprout them into different shapes. FOAS, LOL! That looks more like Billy Crystal than Obama. Sous vide lamb at a higher temperature (150F) is great. Once you set the temperature, nothing can go wrong. dcarch

I grew up eating beef tongue. It was a staple in my folks' home. I cook it still. It's actually not true about the broth tasting undesirable: mine always comes out like a nice strongly-flavored beef broth: think consume. Once I've cleaned and scrubbed it with salt, I put mine to cook overnight in a slow cooker on low. I add cut up onion, carrots, celery, parsnip and a few cloves of garlic to the water and make sure it's totally covered. In the morning the tongue is ready to be peeled, and the broth is ready to be seasoned. Not to mention the very heady aroma of beef broth. I slice my tongue up, cover it with brown mushroom gravy and serve it over mashed potatoes. It can also be chilled and then sliced like deli meat and used in any application that calls for roast beef. My ex used to hate it so I had to get creative. You can cut it up and cube it, then sear it. It makes a great replacement for steak in burritos or tacos. It also goes well as meat in a stew. It's only recently in the last 60 years that we have shunned these alternative meats because we've allowed ourselves to be squeamish and to mentally disconnect with where our food comes from as a society. Not only is it shameful, it's wasteful. You get your sirloin, tenderloin, chuck roast, brisket and rib eye from the same animal. Most people don't tell you this, but the fat you find in organ meats are actually very good for you(most doctors don't even know this anymore). It's a source of high density cholesterol which helps keep your veins and arteries healthy and flexible. And it's not like prepackaged or prepared foods don't have any disgusting ingredients in them, we just don't know the particulars. At least with an offal piece like tongue, you know exactly what you are getting. Tongue of all the offal meats is actually a muscle meat as opposed to the liver, kidneys or tripe.

You'll be hard pressed to find a part of the bovine that I haven't eaten, LOL, although I think maybe not the "pizzle". Then again, maybe, I don't know what all went into Grandma's beef stock and she seldom wasted a morsel. I really don't care for tendon, though, it has that gelatinous texture and leaves a film in my mouth that I don't like. So does Cap'n Crunch, go figure. I wonder if there is beef tendon in that? Although I have to admit that I seldom have the nerve to disagree with Anthony Bourdain, LOL. My Aunt Yoshika used to make stock from the fish heads and I thought that was weird when I was a kid, now I know that it's absolutely normal. I wish I had paid more attention to her cooking, she could have taught me many things, I think. I am glad you enjoy the tendons, though. I believe if an animal gives its life for our sustenance, we should use every part of it and waste nothing. To do otherwise would be disrespectful. Other cultures are much better at it than we are, whether for financial reasons or otherwise, but the end result is that others use parts like the cheeks, the tendons, etc., that we don't. Heck, I remember when we couldn't give away "ox-tail", it was the farmer's cut. Now it's amazing what they want for the stuff. Annie