Ed’s Diner is on vacation until Nov. 5. But, please, talk turkey in the post below.

Restaurant folks: Could you please tell me what your holiday hours and menus will be for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day?

I want to know about holiday lutefisk dinners, too.

Hey, breweries: Talk up your seasonal releases. Any pubs got cask beer festivals going on?

It’s free publicity, folks! Ho, ho, ho!

Everyone’s invited to visit The You Plate Special and comment among yourselves about anything you’ve

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Turkey in Iraq, Thanksgiving Day 2003. (AP photo)

I’m prepping for vacation and the deadlines that follow. Here’s where you come in:

What foods, beverages, restaurants, chefs — and anything else culinary — would you like to give thanks for this Thanksgiving?

Here’s the rule: It has to be in or near the South Sound.

Here’s an example:

I’m thankful for Peterson Cheese in Auburn, distributors of world-class imported and domestic cheese. If you’ve purchased (and enjoyed) a chunk of good Pave

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Sushi Revolution opened today on Tacoma Mall Boulevard (near the old Tony Roma’s).

It claims to be the largest conveyor belt, or kaiten, sushi restaurant in the Northwest. I dropped in for lunch today. While I forgot to carry my measuring tape, I could easily see how Sushi Revolution makes its big claim: the conveyor belt is double tracked, bending back on itself like one of those cattle-chute lines at airport security. Diners have not one, but two moving rows of sushi passing before them to choose from. Get ‘em coming and going.

Sushi

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A Seattle restaurateur who claims to have 30-plus years experience in the business is offering her consulting services to train restaurants and their servers in doing their jobs — serving customers.

“The number one reason customers don’t return to a restaurant is poor service,” Dorothy Frisch wrote on her Polished Service letterhead. “Most customers will not complain directly to the management, making damage control difficult. Likely they will not come back and could tell thousands of Internet readers to not go as well.”

Well, dear Internet readers, do you know why, in Frisch’s estimation, bad service abounds? She

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Wanna buy a wine bar? Not the business, but the bar.

Bacchante Wine & Essentials is being evicted from its North Prospect Street location.



Bacchante proprietor Angi Unger says she’s selling all wine and beer at wholesale prices through Oct. 30. Wine bar fixtures are for sale, too.

A belated tip o’ the mug goes to Jen Gridley, brewer at Fish Brewing Company in Olympia. Gridley’s 2007 Old Woody English-style Old Ale won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver earlier this month. The 2006 edition of Old Woody won Silver at the World Beer Cup in Seattle.

Old Woody carries hints of honey, vanilla, roasted nuts and sweet toasted grain. It’s got a dry hop finish, with a little bit of oak.

Fish releases Old Woody in the spring. It’s generally available into early winter at Fish Tale Brew Pub

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It’s fitting, morbidly so, that this study was reported in the journal Obesity. It names culprits of corpulence: restaurants and customers.

“Many chefs serve portions of food that are two to four times the size recommended in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” said a Clemson University food scientist who co-authored the study. “But they’re driven in large part by customer expectations.”

Of course. Who’s going to order 3 ounces of strip steak and 2 ounces of pasta, as the USDA recommends for each of these foods?

Nearly half of 300 chefs surveyed said they serve

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I’m trying to love lutefisk. ‘Tis lutefisk season and all that.

On Sunday, I ate my first lutefisk of the season, in an-all-you-can-eat lutefisk feed at Normana Hall. My last encounter with lutefisk, two years ago, wasn’t pretty. I said some things about the gelatinous lye-cured cod — “phooey” and “ick,” I believe — that didn’t set well with lutefisk-loving Scandinavians who reached all the way back to Leif Ericson’s crossing of the Atlantic on a bellyfull of lutefisk in order to show me the disrespect I’d afforded their

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