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1172 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
Sharp Bites
BYLINE: By ALLEN SALKIN
SECTION: Section 9; Column 2; Style Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1742 words
THE place had been open all of five minutes, but Restaurant Girl was not backing down.

''The prosciutto is American? '' she asked a waitress at E. U., an East Village restaurant that was trying to overcome a series of setbacks in its first year by hiring a promising young chef, Akhtar Nawab, whose debut was that night.

The waitress answered in the affirmative. It was one of the few things about the food she was sure of, since the time was 6:15 p.m. and the mostly new menu had only been explained at a staff meeting 10 minutes earlier.

''Interesting, interesting,'' Restaurant Girl said, the gold sparkles in her makeup twinkling despite E. U.'s subdued lighting. She smiled at the waitress, who walked away to find the answer to a query about which country in the European Union the crispy short ribs were native to.

Restaurant Girl pulled out a small digital camera and snapped photos of the informal brick and wood decor. ''Classic AvroKo'' she said, referring to the design firm.

As appetizers arrived, one of E. U.'s owners, Jason Hennings, came to the table and apologized if the staff was not well-versed in the menu.

''It's a real coup for you to have convinced Akhtar to come here,'' Restaurant Girl said, changing the subject.

Mr. Jennings proceeded to debate about the merits and failings of E. U.'s four previous chefs. Finally he stepped away, giving a very slight nod. ''That was bananas! Bananas!'' Restaurant Girl said. ''Like an owner pleading for mercy!''

Restaurant Girl is the pseudonym of Danyelle Freeman, 32, a former actress who has been breaking restaurant news and filing reviews on her blog, www.restaurantgirl.com, since March 2006. By last Sunday, three days after her meal, an 829-word review noting that ''the saga of E. U. continues'' and including snapshots of the food and a criticism that the quail was so undercooked ''it practically walked over to the table on its own,'' was posted on the Web site.

Ms. Freeman had beaten to publication a rival blog, Eater, whose scribes had also been at the restaurant that night, and which on Monday reported itself satisfied with Mr. Nawab's hamburger, noting that if E. U. survives, it will be ''an underdog story for the ages.''

There is a new food game in the city that never stops grazing. A proliferation of blogs treating every menu revision, construction permit, clash of egos and suspiciously easy-to-get reservation as high drama is changing the rules of the restaurant world and forcing everyone from owners to chefs to publicists to get used to the added scrutiny.

Diners hungry for the next, the newest, the best, and with no patience to wait for the annual Zagat Guide, are benefiting.

Unlike an earlier wave of food blogs focused on home cooking, recipes and basic restaurant recommendations, the new breed is gossipy and competitive; it trafficks in pointed restaurant criticism and tidbits of news -- Craftsteak has installed a new stove! Emmerite beans have been added to the menu at Tasting Room! -- and is unsettling the ground of the restaurant industry.

''Food blogs have reached a critical mass with readers in the last six months,'' said Phillip Baltz, owner of the restaurant public relations firm Baltz & Company.

Mr. Baltz said two restaurants he represents that opened in 2006, Little Owl and Boqueria, benefited greatly from the early attention of blogs. ''It has completely changed the way we do things,'' he said. ''Bloggers are now a very important part of the media landscape because a lot of diners get their information from them.''

THERE are almost as many new ways to read about the restaurant world as there are blogs. Grub Street (nymag.com/daily/food), New York magazine's food blog started in August last year and written mostly by Josh Ozersky, 39, and Daniel Maurer, 28, has a regular ''Restroom Report.''

Zach Brooks, author of Midtown Lunch, chronicles the comings and goings of sidewalk carts and restaurant traffic between 32nd Street and Central Park the same way paparazzi follow every step of Angelina Jolie.

Eater has a recurring feature called ''Brunibetting'' that sets odds on how many stars Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic of The New York Times (who has his own Times-sanctioned blog, Diner's Journal will bestow in his reviews. Last Tuesday, the odds were set on Gordon Ramsay at the London: Zero Stars: 9 to 1; One Star: 5 to 1; Two Stars, 3 to 1; Three Stars: 6 to 1; and Four Stars: 1,100 to 1. On Wednesday, Mr. Bruni's review appeared, awarding the restaurant two stars.

Clever features are nice. But being first with news about openings and instant judgments about dinner is more important.

''I'm just a dude with a ridiculously opinionated stance on all things food,'' said a 36-year-old blogger who calls himself Augie. He has a day job at a Wall Street firm that, he said, might not appreciate the time he devotes to his blog, so he requested anonymity. His site, Augieland (augieland.blogs.com), made a splash after he ate at the Japanese restaurant Morimoto in Chelsea on 10 consecutive nights and filed a detailed review. Many diners seeking news of Morimoto, which is owned by Masaharu Morimoto, a former combatant on ''Iron Chef,'' looked it up on Internet search engines and were directed to Augie's review. His blog received thousands of visitors.

Last Monday, a freezing evening in Manhattan, Ben Levanthal, 28, and Lockhart Steele, 33, the partners behind Eater, stopped into Morimoto. It was nearly packed, rippling with energy. After sampling tuna tartar with creme fraiche and avocado, they headed across 10th Avenue to Craftsteak. As Mr. Levanthal surveyed the nearly empty space, he said it was likely the steaks would be cooked properly because, as he reported, the restaurant had upgraded the power of its gas grill.

While some restaurant bloggers are just looking to spend a fun night out, the Eater duo, new media entrepreneurs, are hoping to create a lasting business. Mr. Levanthal said the Eater blog attracts ''hundreds of thousands'' of unique visitors a month and sells ads. They added Eater LA in November and are considering San Francisco and Chicago next.

Adam Roberts, 27, was a frustrated law student when he started posting restaurant reviews on the popular message board eGullet . After Mr. Roberts triggered a long discussion about a nasty review he posted of the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter's, he set up his own site, The Amateur Gourmet. A recipe he posted after the 2005 Super Bowl for a cupcake resembling Janet Jackson's breast as glimpsed during her ''wardrobe malfunction'' was linked to by the blogs collegehumor.com and instapundit.com. ''It was huge and catapulted me to fame on the Internet,'' Mr. Roberts said. ''By the next day, I had 100,000 hits.''

He turns a small profit with his blog using an ad-sales service called Blogads, which sells advertising space on his homepage for $800 a month. The success of his site led a book agent to call, which led to the sale of a proposal to Bantam/Dell for a $40,000 advance, Mr. Roberts said.

Ed Levine, a food writer who occasionally contributes to The Times, features Mr. Roberts and a couple of other distinctive food bloggers on his Serious Eats Web site, which went up in November. Mr. Levine realized the extent of the audience for restaurant blogs after posting an entry on his personal blog, Ed Levine Eats, last April 15, saying he planned to have lunch at Per Se in an hour and figured that for the same price he could afford 77 lunches at Gray's Papaya. During his last course at Per Se, the waiters, with a grand flourish, brought out a hot dog. Someone at the restaurant had seen his blog entry only an hour earlier.

Given the small-time finances of most restaurant blogs, and the fact that most bloggers operate apart from the traditional news media, ethical standards are all over the map. Restaurant critics for established publications generally give a new establishment a few weeks or months to settle in and visit several times, spending their employers' money.

Jennifer Leuzzi, who runs the blog Snack (snack.blogs.com) and is also a freelance writer, said she sometimes accepts free meals from restaurants and publicists, but notes it in her postings. Her blog does not take ads, and she sees it mostly as a way to promote her writing.

Mr. Roberts once wrote a letter to Alain Ducasse begging to be invited for free to enjoy the $320 white truffle tasting menu at Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, which has since closed. The experience, presented on Amateur Gourmet as a humorous series of photos with speech bubbles, won an award from a Web site for best food blog post of 2006. Taking freebies earned Mr. Roberts the scorn of Grub Street, which follows New York magazine's prohibitions against most freebies and termed him ''a world-class mooch.''

In the old days, before restaurant blogs started gaining traction with New York diners -- that is, last year -- restaurateurs and their public relations companies were more in control of when diners learned about a new place. But with blogs and potential tipsters on every street corner, little is under control.

Ms. Freeman was the first to break the news that the Russian Tea Room was re-opening with Gary Robins as head chef because she was walking past the West 57th Street location one day last October, noticed construction workers taking a break outside and stopped to ask questions.

Some restaurateurs are only grudgingly adapting. In a telephone interview, Mr. Hennings, the owner of E. U., said he had no idea who Ms. Freeman was the night she dropped by, but he pegged her as a blogger because she was snapping photos. He said it was unfair to judge a restaurant based on the first half-hour of service by a new chef. ''These blogs can be ridiculously hurtful,'' he said.

But others, like David Chang, owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ssam Bar, have embraced the blog world.

''It's instant marketing,'' Mr. Chang said. ''They get the notice out there. It's a more egalitarian thing.''

Ms. Freeman, Restaurant Girl, who had a small speaking part on an episode of ''The Sopranos,'' said she wants to break into the hard-to-crack fraternity of those who are paid to write about food.

On her blog's ''about me'' section, she muses: ''It's just a city full of 'Restaurant Girl's and boys' with a right to their own opinions. I just happen to think mine is the best.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RESTAURANTS (90%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (88%); INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORGANIZATIONS (74%); DIGITAL CAMERAS (72%); INTERNET & WWW (72%); BUILDING PERMITS (50%) Restaurants; Blogs and Blogging (Internet); Computers and the Internet; Public Relations and Publicity
ORGANIZATION: EUROPEAN UNION (56%)
PERSON: Allen Salkin
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (73%) NEW YORK, USA (73%) UNITED STATES (73%); EUROPE (73%); EUROPEAN UNION (58%)
LOAD-DATE: February 4, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION-DATE: February 11, 2007

CORRECTION: An article last Sunday about the new breed of restaurant bloggers on the Internet misidentified the blog that first reported the reopening in Manhattan of the Russian Tea Room, with Gary Robins as the chef. It was the blog Snack, written by Jennifer Leuzzi -- not the blog Restaurant Girl, written by Danyelle Freeman.

The article and a picture caption also misspelled the surname of an owner of another blog, Eater. It is Ben Leventhal, not Levanthal.

GRAPHIC: Photos: SMORGASBORD OF VIEWS -- Food bloggers at Momofuku Ssam Bar in Manhattan. From left, Daniel Maurer, Laren Spirer, Zach Brooks, Jennifer Leuzzi, Danyelle Freeman, ''Nosher'' (who is undercover), Adam Roberts, Ben Levanthal and Josh Ozersky. (Photo by Joe Fornabaio for The New York Times)(pg. 1)

APPETITE FOR BUSINESS -- For Lockhart Steele, left, and Ben Levanthal, food blogging is more than a night out. (Photo by Christopher Smith for The New York Times)(pg. 2)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1173 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 4, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Smokestacks in a White Wilderness Divide Iceland in a Development Debate
BYLINE: By SARAH LYALL
SECTION: Section 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Pg. 16
LENGTH: 1777 words
DATELINE: NORTH OF VATNAJOKULL GLACIER, Iceland
In the depths of winter there is almost nothing to see here but snow and rock: snow across the uneven, unearthly landscape, snow on the mist-shrouded mountains, snow stretching to what looks like the edge of the world.

But tucked into Iceland's central highlands, where the Karahnjukar mountain meets two powerful rivers flowing north from Europe's largest glacier, a nearly completed jigsaw of dams, tunnels and reservoirs has begun to reshape the wilderness.

This is the $3 billion Karahnjukar Hydropower Project, a sprawling enterprise to harness the rivers for electricity that will be used for a single purpose: to fuel a new aluminum smelter owned by Alcoa, the world's largest aluminum company. It has been the focus of the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history.

The culmination of years of effort by the center-right government to increase international investment in Iceland, the project has already begun to revitalize Iceland's underpopulated east. But it has also mobilized an angry and growing coalition of people who feel that the authorities have sacrificed Iceland's most precious asset -- the pristine land itself -- to heavy industry from abroad.

Now, with proposals on the table for three more power-plant-and-aluminum-smelter projects, environmentalists say the chance to protect Iceland's spectacular, and spectacularly fragile, natural beauty is running out.

''If all of these projects get through, then it's a total environmental apocalypse for the Icelandic highlands; they'll have developed every single major glacial river and geothermal field for heavy industry,'' said Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, one of the organizers of Saving Iceland, a coalition of groups opposing further development.

''It is a very rare nature that we are the guardians of, and we are squandering it,'' he said.

The basic issue of how to balance development and nature is the same here as in environmental fights everywhere. But the details are always slightly askew in Iceland, which sits temperamentally as well as geographically on its own, floating between Europe and America.

One of the most unspoiled places in the developed world, Iceland is slightly larger than Indiana, with a population of about 300,000 people (Indiana's is 6.3 million). Two-thirds live in the capital, Reykjavik; the rest are spread across 39,800 square miles of volcanic rock, treeless tundra and scrubby plains. Seventy percent of the land is uninhabitable.

Icelanders tend to view their unpredictable environment -- carved from volcanoes and ice and full of stunning waterfalls, geysers, fjords and glaciers -- with respect and awe. The air is so pure that the Kyoto Protocol gave Iceland the right to increase its greenhouse emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels.

The pending proposals call for four more dams, as many as eight new geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, two new smelters (one owned by Alcoa) and the expansion of capacity at an existing smelter. If all are built, foreign companies would have the capacity to produce as much as 1.6 million tons of aluminum in Iceland a year.

They are also allowed to pollute: another Kyoto exception gave power-intensive industries that use renewable energy in Iceland the right to emit an extra 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year until 2012.

As a whole, the new smelters would require about eight times the amount of electricity currently used for all of Iceland's domestic consumption, putting a huge strain on the country's rivers and thermal fields, said Hjorleifur Guttormsson, who was Iceland's energy and industry minister from 1980 to 1985. Mr. Guttormsson, a naturalist, said pollution was another concern: aluminum plants are heavy emitters of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride and other chemicals.

But Alcoa says it has fitted state-of-the-art pollution controls in its new plant and has already fulfilled its companywide pledge to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from their 1990 level.

A spokesman for the company, Kevin Lowery, said the new smelter would produce 1.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of aluminum it produced -- a total of 541,000 metric tons a year -- compared with 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of aluminum for a coal-fired smelter. ''The emissions from this facility will be less than for any other facility of this size elsewhere in the world,'' he said.

Jon Sigurdsson, minister of industry and commerce, said the proposals were subject to multiple hurdles, including, in some cases, local referendums. The government has always applied rigorous environmental standards to development projects, he said, and is preparing legislation that would set out a master plan for the country, designating which areas are to be protected and which have the potential for development.

''We stand on the threshold of a new era,'' he said. ''We wish to take both sides into consideration in a new general framework that will accept environmental concerns as being as important as other concerns.''

Sigurdur Arnalds, a spokesman for Landsvirkjun, the national power company, which is developing the Karahnjukar project, said: ''Democracy will have the final say. Naturally, we will not build up every possibility we have; we have to stop someplace.''

Iceland is a prosperous country, but its prosperity is concentrated in Reykjavik. The government has long sought ways to bolster the economy by exploiting the country's second- biggest natural resource, after fish: electric power, derived from a vast network of rivers and from underground geothermal fields.

But since the power cannot feasibly be exported, the idea has been to import demand. Aluminum seems a perfect fit. It is a power-intensive industry that needs easy access to ports for importing raw materials and exporting the finished product. Iceland has clean, available power, abundant coasts and proximity to the lucrative European market.

Iceland's first aluminum plant was built in the 1960s; there are now two, both near Reykjavik.

''The government has done everything in its power to make way for these plants,'' Kolbrun Halldorsdottir, a member of Parliament from the Left-Green Movement, said. ''They have been fixed to this scheme like Saudi Arabia is fixed to oil. They don't believe in entrepreneurship, job opportunities in our culture, tourism. They only believe in aluminum.''

The Karahnjukar project, years in planning, had the support of the center-right coalition government, which has been in power for 12 years. In opinion polls, the majority of Icelanders have consistently supported it, too, saying it would bring jobs and money to the eastern fjords.

But environmentalists say the project will devastate some 3 percent of Iceland's land mass, destroying or affecting 60 waterfalls; causing widespread soil erosion that will send sand and dust blowing across the highlands and onto farms; and flooding an area covered in unusual moss and used by reindeer, nesting pink-footed geese and myriad birds, like the gyrfalcon and the ptarmigan.

They say, too, that the dam is inherently unstable, built on an unusually thin, fractured crust of earth near one of the most volcanically volatile areas in the world. Just south, the Vatnajokull glacier is melting rapidly from global warming, adding to the geological uncertainty.

In 2001, the Icelandic Planning Agency rejected the Karahnjukar plan, ruling that any economic benefits would not compensate for the potential environmental harm. But Iceland's environment minister at the time overturned the decision, setsome new conditions and allowed the project to go ahead.

Opponents now say that many Icelanders did not appreciate its scale or potential impact.

''People were kind of misled, and I don't think even the politicians really understood what was going on,'' said Andri Snaer Magnason, a poet, playwright and novelist. Last year, Mr. Magnason, 31, published ''Dreamland,'' a devastating polemic that puts Iceland's environmental issues into a global perspective. The book has sold 18,000 copies -- the equivalent, in percentage terms, of 18 million copies in the United States.

In September, Omar Ragnarsson, one of the country's most respected television reporters, announced that he could no longer cover the Karahnjukar project with a journalist's impartiality and would campaign against it. In a country where public demonstrations are rare, he led an antidam rally in Reykjavik, attended by 8,000 to 13,000 people.

When seen up close, the project dominates the landscape. At 2,400 feet wide and 650 feet tall, the dam is the highest of its kind in Europe. The reservoir, which will eventually cover 22 square miles, stretches out across one side, where land used to be; an empty riverbed carved far down in the rock stretches from the other side, where water used to be.

The harnessed water is to be sent through 45 miles of tunnels blasted into the mountains to a new hydropower station built deep inside a mountain in the Fljotsdalur Valley.

Finally, the electricity is to be sent along 32 miles of overland transmission lines to the Alcoa smelter, a milelong building on the edge of a fjord in the town of Reydarfjordur.

The smelter is supposed to begin producing aluminum by this summer, and the initial effects are obvious: there is a building boom going on in the east. ''It's like gold fever, or when everyone is drunk -- and you know that the hangover will come,'' said Greta Osk Sigurdardottir, a cattle and dairy farmer who lives in the area and who opposes the project.

Reydarfjordur, population 650, has its first mall. Housing prices have gone up. People are moving back, and the extra money has begun to give the town modern amenities, said Helga Jonsdottir, the mayor of Reydarfjordur and five other villages.

But others are not so happy. Gudmundur M. H. Beck spent his first 57 years in Reydarfjordur, raising sheep and chickens on his family's farm. When 18 electricity pylons were built across the land and the government passed regulations forbidding grazing there, Mr. Beck took his animals to the slaughterhouse and moved north, where he lives near unspoiled mountains and lakes and is taking history classes, he said.

''This is the most horrible thing that has ever been done here,'' he said. ''I really have no words to describe it.''

The smelter is low, but dominates the coast. Shopping at a sporting-goods store at the mall, Krilla Bjork, 61, said she was thrilled at all the new stores and houses. Of the smelter, she said, ''It's not beautiful, but I accept it because it's necessary.''

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