Not So Simple

Graphic designers are wonderful, charming people who make the world a more beautiful place. But when they design book or magazine pages, some of them fall into a kind of professional madness: They start thinking of text as no more than part of a visual design. Unfortunately, we don’t just look at written words--we read them, which is a totally different mental act.

“Chic Simple Cooking,” one of a series of books that promise to teach us how to be simply chic, shows what happens when this kind of designer gets a free hand. This overbearing volume hammers the reader (or perhaps looker) with ultra-closeup photos, text overprinted with art, overscale type faces in varying colors and bite-sized quotes of varying degrees of quotability (e.g., “Veal, what is veal?”--James Leeds, “Children of a Lesser God”). In its ruthlessness about grabbing the eye--the expression “in your face” may come to mind--it seems to imply the reader has the attention span of Kato Kaelin.

Beneath the dazzle, if you can bring yourself to look that far, you find the old cookbook-as-cooking-school concept: Each chapter begins with a basic recipe such as soup stock, followed by variations. The idea is that “Chic Simple Cooking” will serve as a basic cookbook for people who find regular cookbooks too complicated, but time will tell whether, with its hyperactive style, it really is more accessible. (It might work better as a CD-ROM disc, and in fact the designers seem to think it already is one. Certain elements are highlighted, like a button in hypertext, except that you can’t click a mouse on a book page.)

“Chic Simple Cooking” (by Kim Johnson and Jeff Stone, recipes with Sally Sampson, text by Todd Lyon: Knopf) is available at bookstores.

A Cheese Omelet and Home Fries or We Walk

The chorus of a touring French opera company staged a one-day strike last Thursday to protest the breakfasts in their San Francisco hotel. The grievance of the Opera de Lyon chorus was that the featured singers and much of the orchestra got higher per-diem pay and were lodged in a nice hotel that serves a full breakfast, while the 40 chorus members had to stay in a downtown hotel that offers nothing but a Continental breakfast of coffee and pastries.

The Opera de Lyon’s performances of Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges” are part of the ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations charter in San Francisco.

The Beef of the Sea

Highest-quality bluefin tuna has sold for as much as $26,000 a pound in Tokyo. And that was from fish that probably hadn’t even been fed on beer and massaged daily.

Barkeep, Put Some Whipped Cream on This

Every year the Institute of Food Technologists has a product development competition for its student association. This year’s entries included not only such obvious food technology ideas as toastable frozen pizza pockets and nonfat split pea chips, but also a beer with a cherry and chocolate flavor.