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- FOOD, Page 52MOST OF '90
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- Most Favored Vegetable. No need to limit yourself to a red
- from Colorado or one of Idaho's browns. What about Yukon Gold?
- Or Peruvian purple? We're talking serious potato now -- the
- bulked-out veggie that conquered the culinary world in 1990. At
- power luncheries, a favorite appetizer of the glitterati was a
- spare baked potato. But you could get it boiled, fried,
- duchessed and, most of all, mashed.
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- Best Food on the Road. Not so long ago, most U.S. hotel
- meals seemed designed to horrify any gourmet. But in 1990 the
- top-rated hotels in the first Zagat U.S. Travel Survey of more
- than 1,400 inns, resorts and spas all boasted superb cuisine as
- well as superluxury accommodations. So what if few but foreign
- tourists can afford them?
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- Best New Dining Concept. One of the earliest harbingers of
- economic recession wasn't longer lines at soup kitchens. It was
- the sight of trendy restaurants frantically begging for new
- customers by lowering prices, simplifying menus and advertising
- themselves as -- code words of the '90s -- cafes, grills,
- bistros or trattorias.
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- Soundest Dietary Restriction. The 1990 Nutrition Labeling
- and Education Act mandates standard definitions of such terms
- as light and lowfat, bans misleading claims and requires food
- producers to list the amount of dietary fiber and saturated fat
- in raw seafood, fruit and vegetables as well as on most
- packaged-goods labels.
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- Latest Immortality Elixir. Not so long ago, the secret
- ingredient to lower cholesterol was oat bran, which proved to
- be no more or less magical than low-fiber grains. In 1990 health
- nuts got hooked on canola oil, which is made from rapeseed.
- Enough! cried Julia Child. "If fear of food continues, it will
- be the death of gastronomy in the United States."
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- Best Wine Buys. Alsatian whites and Chilean reds. The
- fruity, bone-dry Pinot Blancs and Pinot Gris from Alsace are
- still quality bargains from France. For everyday drinking,
- Chile's suave, uncomplicated Cabernet Sauvignons couldn't be
- beat at $3.99 and up.
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- Least-Sparkling Water. It wasn't Perrier's year. First, lab
- tests found traces of benzene, a potential carcinogen, in
- samples of the green-bottled bubbly. Then the French government
- forced Perrier to drop the words naturally carbonated from its
- European labels. ("Naturally" had earlier been deemed a no-no
- in the U.S.) Evian has now supplanted Perrier as America's
- top-selling imported bottled water.
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- Biggest Turkey. TV's most obnoxious chef is a would-be comic
- whose series appears on the Discovery Channel. Pasquale Carpino
- of Pasquale's Kitchen Express yowls snatches of operatic arias
- as he demolishes eggplants and describes his recipes in a
- tootsie-frootsie accent that was barely funny when Chico Marx
- used it.
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- Biggest Brewhaha. Long the target of unions and
- minority-rights groups, Coors Brewing Co. acquired a new enemy
- with its popular promo for Coors Light, featuring a haunted
- house and the slogan "It Isn't Halloween Without the Silver
- Bullet." The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence
- described the ad's subliminal appeal to underage drinkers as
- "chilling."
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- Priciest Slab of Cholesterol. Japan's richly marbled Kobe
- beef, from beer-fed cattle, was featured for the first time on
- the menus of a few U.S. restaurants. For $100 or so, you could
- order an inch-high steak weighing 14 oz. to 16 oz.
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