Gio Gutierrez

Zen Sushi Lounge Review

Giovanny — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:49:42 +0000

Being a big fan of sushi and living in Brickell, I was excited to see yet another Sushi Restaurant in our neighborhood.

So Zen is absolutely beautiful. Definitely the nicest and well decorated spot in the area from the indoor rock wall water fountain to the friendly waitresses in fancy geisha outfits. Zen lives up to its name when it comes to this.

Menu is quite expansive with great and clever names, the food comes out and is presented very nicely however the taste was just OK. Let me be more specific – every plate that was NOT sushi was good and overall nothing I would HAVE to go back for but these were probably my favorite:

• The hamachi with Tiger milk
• Jalapeño Cheese Poppers
• A spring-like roll with sticky paper outside filled with crab and a mixed tuna topping on the side was great

The problem was the sushi rolls. They suffered – really bad. Most had little flavor and way too much rice. Look at the pics I uploaded and you’ll see what I mean. Needless to say we didn’t care to finish any of them. I think there was only one roll I enjoyed that had Fried Plantains on top (like Yum’s Ño Roll) with added chipotle sauce (pics to come).

If they didn’t have the competition of 8 others within a mile radius, it would probably do a lot better but it’s a though battle to win (sumo challenege?). If I had to walk, I would go a block further to SuViche (a block away) for better tasting sushi which is all that matters in the end.

PS: Here are my favorites in order from best to worst tasting sushi:

Mr. Yum
2B
SuViche
Abokado
Indochine
Zen Sushi Lounge
Saki Sushi
Mikan

Bistro | e Review

Giovanny — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:22:53 +0000

EOS restaurant is now “Bistro | e” at lunch time with a new menu and great specials such as 3 preselected dishes and a pint of beer for $15. Example: blood-e mary ceviche, mussels in salsa verde and a key lime pie.

Tried the White Asparugus Salad w/ Egg and Truffles, Heirloom Tomato Salad, Spicy Tuna Tacos and the Grilled Cheese BLT (w/o bacon) which had Kale for a nice twist with a side of fries that were potato chunks baked, squashed then fried (ala tostones). Amazing! Two of my meat eating friends raved about their Short Rib Tostada and the Meatball Sliders. (check out the food pics)

Food, presentation, decor, service, all A+. Really… I was curious on their Lychee Lemonade with Ginger and got a free sample which worked as it was deliciously refreshing and I’ll be ordering it every time. Here’s the Bistro | e menu.

Goat Cheese Corn Quesadilla, Curried Spinach and Thai Cucumber Salad

Giovanny — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:27:50 +0000

Here’s tonights dinner recipes as requested by @BrianBreslin.

Curried Spinach

This one took a little while compared to the other two so I would start this dish first while working on the other 2 when you get a few minute in between.

Olive oil in a saucepan, add a diced white onion, a diced tomato and 1 or 2 garlic cloves minced.

Season with a teaspoon and a half of curry (any flavor really), a teaspoon and a half of turmeric and half a teaspoon of cumin and let it cook for a few minutes.

Add 2 bags of rinsed and drained, chopped spinach. Pour in a can of light coconut milk (healthier than cream believe it or not!) Let it cook for about 5 minutes.

Add a can of drained chickpeas, season w/ salt and pepper and your done!

Thai Cucumber Salad

Peel and slice a cucumber and plate. Top it with half a red onion sliced as well and topped with red chili or jalapeño for some kick.

Make a dressing of water, vinegar, sugar and salt and pour on top of your salad chill in the fridge ’till ready.

Goat Cheese Corn Quesadilla

Cook 1 cup of corn (I nuked it for 90 seconds) and mix in a bowl with 2 oz. goat cheese and 2 scallions chopped. Add a little salt & pepper and stuff 2 corn tortillas and grill. Done and delicious.

Whole thing took 35 minutes and feeds four hungry people.

Adobe to Roll Out iPad Publishing Software

Giovanny — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:05:27 +0000

Adobe is working on a new kind of creative software specifically intended to help you publish digital magazines for tablet devices such as the iPad, the company revealed today. Here’s an overview of what Adobe is calling the Digital Magazine Workflow/Digital Content Builder:

This new software, which will soon take its place in the Creative Suite pantheon, will be downloadable from Adobe Labs and will include tools that bridge the gap between print-oriented InDesign and software for interactive formats.

The company’s goal is to make it simpler for more publishers to create and profit from tablet magazines like Wired’s hugely successful iPad offering. Wired used InDesign and a mix of other software to make its product.

The new Adobe technologies will focus on mobile hardware-specific needs, including 360-degree image rotation and pinch/swipe gestural navigation for panning and zooming. This is currently accomplished through an AIR utility, the Interactive Overlay Creator. In future versions of InDesign, the Interactive Overlay Creator will be an integrated feature.

Adobe is also making it easier to add mobile-friendly multimedia to slick, print-reminiscent layouts. From what we can see in a brief demo, it looks like designers will have a lot of fun taking an on-screen mockup to a .issue format magazine with relative ease. We can’t wait to try it out ourselves.

Adobe will let you import layouts from InDesign to the new workflow. From there, you’ll be able to add metadata, experiment with portrait and landscape layouts, and export content to the .issue format — a brand-new, ready-to-render file for digital magazines.

Geek Artist Making $50 Caricatures Over FaceTime

Giovanny — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:01:52 +0000

Dlanham Portrait

Does your Twitter/Facebook/IM avatar suck? The answer is likely to be a resounding “probably”. You need a custom caricature, and being a proper geek, you should get it not from the dodgy street-artist with the portfolio of sample “work” downloaded from the internet, but over the actual internet.

That’s just what Dave Lanham, artist extraordinaire and designer at the Icon Factory (the people behind Twitterific and a lot more besides) is doing. Dave is holding FaceTime calls with his iPhone 4 and drawing the portrait of the person at the other end. The hi-resolution Retina display no doubt helps him to see deep into your soul.

The fun started when Dave broke his foot and was left lounging around the house. His friend Gio Gutierrez (right) volunteered for a portrait and then things just got bigger and bigger. Dave is charging $50 per portrait, which you can then use as your online personality (or print on a T-Shirt, we guess, if you are really narcissistic). The demand is likely to be huge, so even if you can’t get on his list, you should check out Dave’s website, which has time-lapse videos of his work being made.

FaceTime Portraits [Dave Lanham on Flickr]

@dlanham [Twitter]

Dave’s website home-page [Dave Lanham]

[Post from Wired by Charlie Sorrel]

How the OldSpice YouTube videos are being made.

Giovanny — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:22:33 +0000

How do you take the social web by storm in a day, winning over even the coldest of hearts and gaining international acclaim – with commercials?

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that’s just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here’s how it’s going down.

Setting the Stage

Old Spice, marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy and actor Isaiah Mustafa are collaborating on the project. The group seeded various social networks with an invitation to ask questions of Mustafa’s character, a dashing shirtless man with over-the-top humor and bravado. Then all the responses were tracked and users who contributed interesting questions and/or were high-profile people on social networks are being responded to directly and by name in short, funny YouTube videos. The group has made videos in response to Digg founder Kevin Rose, TV star Alyssa Milano (now big on Twitter) and many more people, famous and not.

It is well done and it appeals to peoples’ egos – but there is something more, too. It feels very personalized, even if it wasn’t directed at you. Those people that got responses, and many people who didn’t, have Tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise shared links to the videos back out across their social networks.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, is leading the effort. “In a way there’s nothing magical that we’ve done here,” he explained by phone this afternoon. “We just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we’ve also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time.”

How They Are Doing It

Tait says that the primary differentiator between this campaign and others is how closely technical and social media specialists are working with the creative team. “We brought social media experts right into the creative process,” he told me. Tell that to the next person who claims that all so-called social media experts are just hot-air. Tait’s own savvy no doubt played a large role in the success of the campaign as well. He’s just been at Wieden for 3 months, after leaving a UK agency he co-founded 8 years ago. He was voted the Most Influential Person in the UK’s New Media Age Top 100 Interactive Agencies Guide last year.

“In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time,” Tait says. (Right: Inside the studio, around noon today.)

“We’re looking at who’s written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we’re editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web…in real time.”

The videos aren’t being posted in chronological order immediately after the Tweets and comments they are in reply to. They get moved up and down a queue in a deliberate, orchestrated, if very fast way.

Tait: “Those people are having more fun than I’ve ever seen anyone have in a shoot like this. That’s part of why it’s doing so well. It’s genuinely infectious, it transmits itself through the internet in a massive way.”

Freedom

Tait says that Old Spice’s parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.

“There is such great trust [between the companies],” he said. “But we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”

That trust is all the more necessary because of how new this really is, in some ways. “If the message that comes out of this is that you can make TV commercials in 30 minutes, then we’re all out of a job,” Tait jokes. “This is something new. We’re operating on Internet time but with a level of quality you’d get on a TV slot. That combination was what really got many peoples’ attention.”

Old Spice continues to post new, personalized videos to its YouTube channel. How long can they go? No one knows, but Mustafa’s sure to smile seductively and make a goofy-macho joke about it once the team is done.

The campaign itself is unlikely to end even then, though. You can already get an Old Spice Man voicemail message generated for your phone. The coolest thing about that? That system wasn’t even created by Old Spice or Wieden – it was built by a crowd of users at social news site Reddit this afternoon.

Update: At midnight Wednesday night, a very tired looking Mustafa posted the following conclusion.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Writeables

Giovanny — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:53:19 +0000

Lulu Review

Giovanny — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:39:15 +0000

From the owners of Green Street Cafe, comes Lulu – another outdoor sidewalk restaurant right across the street. The service was impeccable – timing on the food, refills on water, etc. The quality of the food was great as well as the decor (check out some of the pics). Onto the food:

Small Plates:
* Fried Green Tomatoes w/ Jalapeño Ranch – Delicious….

Sandwiches:
* Veggie Burger made from Tofu, Quinoa, Farro, Melted Munster, Creamy Chili and Hummus Vinaigrette – Doesn’t beat Houston’s but it sure is wonderfully hearty.
* Mahi Mahi blackened with Sliced Mangoes and Red Pepper Mango – The bread on this sandwich was a whole wheat which is a bit too tough for a seafood sandwich IMHO. Besides that, it was a nice piece of fish with mango slices giving it a unique twist.

Sides:
* Fries – These were damn good. You know the kind, double flash fried for that ultimate crisp.
* Roasted Asparagus -

Overall tasty, affordable good food at a great price, what’s not to like?

Fin Review

Giovanny — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:31:49 +0000

I couldn’t be happier to attend Fin’s first night and be the first here on Yelp to review.

Fin is located in the west side of the Design District next door to Q, Eismann’s BBQ eatery. Both spots take over the old Sheba Ethiopian restaurant. The decor is straight out of a Martha’s Vineyard with white wooden chairs, baby blue pin stripe wallpaper, etc… Service was spectacular and needless to say food was fantastic, reasonably price and decent portions (aka the exact amount we need, nothing more!). Here’s what we had:

Amuse Bouche:
• Popcorn Shrimp w/ Ginger Target accompanied with a Tomato/Lobster Broth

First Course:
• Soft Shell Crab Summer Salad w/ Apples and Shaved Fennel – Very delicious and light.
• Spicy Shrimp Curry Jasmine Rice, Celery, Bananas, Coconut Water, Harissa – Amazing! Very original and unique dish. The favorite hands down for everyone in our party.

Entree:
• Pacific Halibut Fillets Browned in Organic Olive Oil And Organic Butter Preserved Lemon Risotto/Lemon Grass – My personal favorite dish of the night. Got better and better with every taste.
• Line Caught Black Cod/Oregon Coast Pan Roasted, Miso, Sweet Sake Yukon Gold Puree w/ Edamame, Mustard Oil – The cod melted in our mouths. ‘Nuff said.

Sides:
• Wood Roasted Parsnips and Beet
• Curried French Lentils – Disappointed that this was the same EXACT dish from Pacific Time
• Corn Succotash – Best side dish.

Dessert:
• Summer Peaches Sautéed With Local Lavender Phyloo Crisps – Great, light dessert that doesn’t make you unbutton your pants.
• Warm Apple Crumble – It was missing a vanilla bean ice cream so it wasn’t as good as it could have been.

Overall a 5 stars – another great dining addition to the Design District.

Mr. Yum

Giovanny — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:22:37 +0000