Restaurateurs Have Food for Thought: Cook Your TV Dinners at Home

This is one for everyone who thinks modern manners have gone to hell.

Ed and Marla Moore run a restaurant in Ocean Beach called Thee Bungalow. Continental and regional American cuisine, mid-range of prices.

When Times food critic David Nelson paid a visit, he left full of praise for the fish dumplings, lamb Wellington, chocolate-hazelnut cake and more.

Like other restaurant proprietors, Ed Moore has made his compromises with a changing world of late.

More people are bringing their own wine. More people are even bringing their own special desserts.

OK, times change and the restaurant business is very competitive. The customer is always right (especially when he’s dead wrong).

But neither wine nor desserts prepared Moore for the diner who, without a hint of embarrassment, plunked down her box of NutriSystem Homestyle Chicken and asked a waiter to just let it boil and simmer.

The waiter, taken aback, relayed the unusual order to the chef. The chef took the order to Moore, who nodded a reluctant yes.

The chicken began to boil. So did Moore, who wrote later: “I saw my life flashing before my eyes.”

He’s 39, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu gourmet cooking school in Paris. He’s worked at some of San Diego’s finest restaurants, including Gustaf Anders in La Jolla and Cafe Eleven in Hillcrest.

And now he was being asked to boil and simmer a mass of prepackaged diet food! It’s enough to make a chef commit violence with his spatula.

“It looked terrible, it smelled terrible, I’d rather starve than eat something like that,” said Moore, even now recoiling at the horror of it all.

Still, the waiter served the meal without a hint at the fury it had provoked back in the kitchen.

Moore says he’s sympathetic to the weight-conscious. He’s willing to prepare a diet meal (chicken, pasta, veggies) that he says will be as low-calorie as any of the commercial stuff and a good deal tastier.

But still, he says, enough is enough.

So, in his recent bimonthly newsletter to customers, Moore has made one thing perfectly clear:

“I will never again boil and simmer for anyone.”

Yes, Spelling Counts

Words and numbers.

* Prevent Incorrect Spellings Now!

The Peter Navarro campaign is sending out letters over the mayoral candidate’s signature that contain misspelled words: relevent and committment.

* Advertising slogan for a San Diego carpet cleaning firm: “We Love It When You Talk Dirty.”

* Harper’s magazine, which loves to print political documents and provide scathing commentary, is interested in the now-infamous “welfare-cutting is good politics” memo to Supervisor Susan Golding from consultant Dick Dresner.

* You may have missed it, but Leatherfest IV, touted as San Diego’s “premier event for the leather community” was a smashing success at the Mission Valley Holiday Inn.

Included were lectures/demonstrations on bondage, catheters, piercing, flogging, electricity and “unusual toys,” plus a master-slave auction and fun run.

More than 200 persons attended. Proceeds ($3,700-plus) went to the AIDS Foundation food bank.

* Robin Leach (“Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous”) jets to San Diego next week to film a TV commercial for the Micro Diet of Carlsbad-based UniVite.

The filming will be aboard a yacht, naturally.

Unchecked Rhetoric

Check that irony.

San Diego Councilman Bob Filner is lashing at former Rep. Jim Bates, his opponent in the Democratic primary in the 50th Congressional District, over Bates’ overdraft checks from the House bank.

Especially for a check Bates wrote to his own (losing) campaign in 1990, which Filner blasts as “an interest-free gift from the House bank to bankroll his own reelection effort.”

But that wasn’t the only House check that Bates wrote for political purposes that year.

He also wrote a $250 check to “San Diegans for Bob Filner,” the councilman’s committee to retire a previous campaign debt.

The canceled check shows that the Filner folk cashed it immediately, no questions asked.