Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times Frank Castronovo, left, and Frank Falcinelli at Frankies Spuntino.

They may be up to their elbows in the multifaceted Prime Meat project, with its bar, restaurant, kitchen and retail components in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, but Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo still seem to have time to pursue other ventures nearby.

On March 11 they plan to open Cafe Peddlar, 210 Court Street (Warren Street).

“It will be like a little Demel’s from Vienna,” Mr. Castronuovo said, “with sacher tortes, linzer tortes, and strudels.”

The baking is being done at Prime Meats and the coffee will be from Stumptown.

Kim Severson reported that organic inspectors don’t necessarily protect us against food poisoning. But neither do food safety inspectors, Michael Moss and Andrew Martin report.

“With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the nation’s food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large part fallen to an army of private auditors,” they say. “An examination of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in recent years — in products as varied as spinach, pet food, and a children’s snack, Veggie Booty — shows that auditors failed to detect problems at plants whose contaminated products later sickened consumers.”

Ramin Talaie for The New York Times Do customers owe hard-working servers nice tips?

Whenever tipping in restaurants comes up, readers get riled up.

They get riled up whether the discussion revolves around coat checks, as it did in one recent post, or around the percentage that diners tip on the dinner check, as it did in a post about a week and a half ago.

And without fail some readers who submit comments complain about the very practice of tipping, expressing resentment that servers expect tips and that restaurants don’t pay servers enough to eliminate our obligation to tip them.

But in their resentment these readers sometimes seem to look past something, and I think it’s worthwhile to take note of what some of them are ignoring before the next go-round about tipping on this blog:

If restaurants paid their workers significantly more and took us off the hook for tips, they’d no doubt transfer the expense of those higher salaries to us, in the form of higher appetizer prices, higher entrée prices, steeper wine mark-ups, maybe even flat cover charges of some kind. Read more…

Gordon Ramsay seems to be facing financial difficulties.

Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times No wait for a table at Per Se?

When the restaurant Per Se opened in 2004, and for several years thereafter, it was synonymous with the grueling, humbling process of trying to thread the reservation needle and get a coveted table that hundreds of competitors also wanted.

As I once described in a blog post about all the time I spent dialing Per Se or idling on hold, you had to call the restaurant exactly a month to the day ahead of your desired dining date. You had to call almost as soon as the reservation line opened at 10 a.m. And you had to be prepared to accept a dinner hour of 5:30 or 9:30 p.m.

Per Se could demand all of that, because Per Se was in that kind of demand.

So I was surprised and intrigued by an email I received on Monday from one of my trusted restaurant scouts, a regular patron of high-end establishments like Per Se: Read more…

Arthur Bovino A slice of pizza at Little Vincent’s in Huntington, Long Island, with extra cold cheese.

We’re always on the lookout for the latest in pizza trends. Here’s a new one on us, direct from a pizzeria called Little Vincent’s in Huntington, N.Y.– cold cheese on a hot slice. Read more…

Kim Severson was on the NPR program “The Takeaway” this morning discussing her article on organic certification and food safety. Here’s a peek.

Don Ipock for The New York Times Jason Day, left, and Aaron Chronister prepare a bacon explosion.

Would this come under the heading of rewarding bad behavior — or good?

Jason Day and Aaron Chronister, who created the Bacon Explosion last year and then promulgated it to the world through their BBQAddicts.com website, have gotten a book deal, as Eat Me Daily reports.

Scribner bought their book, “Barbecue Makes Everything Better,” at auction “in a six-figure deal,” according to Publisher’s Lunch, an online publishing industry newsletter. Read more…

You learn the darndest things on Twitter. From @gachatz, the Nom de Tweet of a certain Chicago chef:

looking for a space for a new concept. Lincoln park and/or bucktown areas.

Frank Bruni reviews L’Artusi, in the Village, and, in Midtown, Betsy Andrews tries a remarkable variety of breakfasts from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Doug Psaltis, who had been doing consulting work after leaving Country last year, is now the executive chef and a partner at Smith’s on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

Associated Press Heston Blumenthal, who temporarily shut down his Michelin-starred restaurant amid a food poisoning scare.

Heston Blumenthal, chef of the renowned Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, said temporarily closing it after a food poisoning scare has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in bookings and it’s still not clear whether food from the restaurant sickened customers.

He expects to reopen on Wednesday after the results of a final batch of tests are known.

On his blog, Harold McGee says that after writing about cooking pasta in much less water than usual, he heard about other methods of doing it, some by chefs.

Heston Blumenthal, one of the most acclaimed chefs in the world, has temporarily closed his restaurant the Fat Duck in Bray, England, after an apparent food poisoning scare.

On the Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin writes about how some school districts deal with children whose parents can’t afford the school lunch, they give them a cold cheese sandwich.