The Restaurant Guys

Ann Tuennerman is founder of the New Orleans based event, Tales of the Cocktail, which has celebrating the art of well-crafted cocktails since 2003. Ann's love of cocktails, cuisine, history and New Orleans prompted her to found both The New Orleans Original Cocktail Tour and the New Orleans Culinary & Cultural Preservation Society. * Jim Weaver is head of the Central New Jersey chapter for Slow Food and Executive Chef of Princeton's Tre Piani Restaurant. He has cooked professionally since 1980 and serves on the board of directors for The New Jersey Restaurant Association, is the Restaurant Liaison for the Governor's Counsel on Tourism, is a director for The Hunterdon-Princeton Chaine des Rotisseurs. The Slow Food Movement serves to preserve and promote local food traditions, food education, taste education, public awareness and promotion. Weaver has started an "Ark of Taste" to preserve "endangered foods" and food production methods from extinction, spearheading the effort to preserve the Delaware Bay Oyster from extinction. He joins the show today to promote this year's celebration of the East Coast Slow Food and Wine Festival that will be held June 27, 28 2009 at Hopewell Valley Vineyards in Pennington, NJ....

Bon Appetite Magazine recently named some of America's best ice cream shoppes. In New York - it's a fleet of ice cream trucks - Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream (the ice cream is also available in some stores such as Whole Foods). A Washington D.C. native and a current Brooklynite, Benjamin Wallace is fast establishing himself as one of today's up-and-coming authors. Wallace's work has been published in GQ, Food & Wine, Salon, The Washington Post, and Details, garnering national recognition for spotlighting conservative mouthpiece Glenn Beck in 2007. From 1996 to 2005, Wallace worked at Philadelphia Magazine where he not only served as Executive director, but also discovered the controversial historical tale that would later become the inspiration for his first book. In the "Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine", Wallace delves into the questionable authenticity of the story of a 1787 bottle of Chateau Lafite Bordeaux owned by Thomas Jefferson. Fetching $156,000 at auction, rumors concerning the bottle's legitimacy abounded, involving an intriguing web of eccentric, but overly wealthy characters who regularly indulged in wines worth thousands of dollars. Wallace investigated not just that one specific transaction, but the entire ostentatious world of wine collecting in the mid-eighties....