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- Thirty-one-flavor purveyor Baskin-Robbins appears to be ripping off New York City-based chain Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer, which is famous for its decadent milkshakes. BR is now serving “freak shakes,” with toppings such as whole doughnuts, cotton candy, and Oreos.
- Charlie Ayers, Google’s first executive chef, details the tech company’s bad old days in a new book. “I had live bands, DJs, and we bought truckloads of alcohol and a bunch of pot and made ganja goo balls,” Ayers recounts, according to Business Insider. “I remember people coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m hallucinating. What the fuck is in those?’” Sounds like an extremely professional work environment.
- The Baccarat Hotel in NYC just introduced a $1,500 ice cream sundae, which checks in as the most expensive in America. What makes a frozen dessert so exorbitant? The “bear extraordinaire” comes with a white chocolate shell that is hand-painted with colored cocoa butter, three grams of black truffle crumble (black truffle mixed with 64 percent Manjari dark chocolate), Valrhona Gold cocoa nibs, a hibiscus-champagne sauce, citrus meringue, fondant butterflies, angel-hair sugar strands, and edible gold and silver leafing. Yum.
- A magician really freaked Drake out with this lollipop trick.
Magic @Drake #scorpion pic.twitter.com/dVbs8VQcUK
— Julius Dein (@JuliusDein) July 12, 2018
- Online retail giant Amazon boasts an impressive selection of bizarre novelty snacks. Here’s a rundown of all the weird foodstuffs.
- Time magazine has a profile of Hong Kong’s Lung King Heen, the world’s only three-Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant.
- The latest Quartz obsession is the plastic straw, which, despite its mundane status as a little-thought-about drinking accessory, is generating tons of headlines these days.
- In an online-only segment from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, shouty chef Gordon Ramsay revives his Twitter schtick of lambasting amateur cooking with overly mean insults. Here, he roasts Sunday roasts.
- Coffee-and-doughnut chain Dunkin’ has a new chief executive officer, Dave Hoffman, and he believes more student-work and work-study visas will be the solution to a labor shortage in the industry. Former Dunkin’ CEO and newly minted executive chairman Nigel Travis plans to lobby Washington for more immigrant workers.
- In China, coffee startup Luckin is aggressively taking on Starbucks. The company, which launched less than nine months ago, is now valued at $1 billion.
- When England scores World Cup goals, English soccer fans — they call it “football” over there, mate — waste a lot of beer. Considering the Three Lions lost their semifinal game against Croatia in extra time, all of those perfectly good suds could have gone toward drowning some serious sorrows.
England fans in Hyde Park waste about $10,000 in beer on team’s first goal against Croatia pic.twitter.com/lfCxGZfqNW
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 11, 2018
- Croatians are pretty good at throwing beer, too, but they can’t match the English. Watching their team play in the World Cup final against France should offer some consolation.
Scene in Croatia’s Ban Jelacic Square when team scored goal to tie England pic.twitter.com/udfCzk5Ywy
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) July 11, 2018
- Congratulations to residents of the state of New York, who can now legally purchase beer ice cream. This might be the perfect base for John Steinbeck’s beer milkshake.
- Customers are feeling more satisfied at restaurants, and it may be due to the deployment of automated ordering systems and service-industry robots. It seems people can’t stand talking to other people.
- And, finally, it’s hot outside, so feel free to drink your wine on the rocks.
