Hasta La Gadget!

The best gimmick a restaurant can use is to serve excellent food, hopefully with efficient service. Failing that, the next best thing is… Well, anything really. Stupid menus where you have to read off food combos on a grid and tick the right box, like a math test. Waitresses in tight shorts and t-shirts. And now, iPads instead of menus.

That’s just what the “Do at the View” pizza restaurant is doing in Atlanta, Georgia, where you get an iPad instead of a paper menu when you sit at your table. Using the tablet, you can browse the “musically-inspired” (“do” is pronounced “dough,” as in do, re, mi. Get it?) dishes, call your car out of valet parking and change the music playing in the restaurant. You can also enter into the restaurant’s private chatroom and harass fellow guests.

It doesn’t stop there. In the bathrooms, you’ll find iPads on the walls instead of mirrors. In fact, the whole place seems to be designed to stop you from relaxing. Not only do you have to do your own ordering and music-choosing, you also have to contend with graphic displays covering the walls which flicker and flash like an iTunes visualizer.

Despite all this, the menu is priced very reasonably. And thanks to all the iPad-friendliness, Do at the View has a non-Flash website, meaning it is probably the only Web site in the world that can be viewed on a cellphone.

Restaurant site [Do at the View via Cult of Mac]

See Also:

• Your Restaurant's Next Menu Is An iPad
• Illuminated Menus Help Diners Decide in the Dark

The Citrocasa Fantastic can juice up to 30 oranges per minute

If you are the head of a family of very thirsty Oompa-Loompas, a race of people who — unknown to many — require several gallons of fresh orange juice a day, along with pounds of carrots and even the odd pumpkin, to keep their orange color*, then you might want to take a look at the Citrocasa Fantastic. It’s a trimmed-down version of the orange-squeezer familiar from a million airports, malls and cafes.

It works like this: A reservoir of fresh fruit runs through a tubular cage and into the maw of the machine. There each orange is split with a blade and fed into a series of rollers which force the sharp, acidic juice from its fleshy home. As each orange is fed to its fate, a digital counter marks its passing. Tick, tick, tick.

While the Citrocasa Fantastic could certainly be used in the home, the real destination of this cut-down version is the smaller bar or coffee shop, where its 55-kilo (121-pound) bulk will be seen as blessedly slim, not unfathomably large. Even so, it is easy to use. To get a glass of juice, just press the tap and the everything purrs into action. Even cleaning is simple. The quick-release squeezing assembly pulls out and drops straight into the dishwasher.

The price is the exact same price as any piece of catering equipment — whatever your local vendor thinks he can get away with. To this end, you might want to consider an old-fashioned reamer to do the job instead.

Citrocasa Fantastic product page [Citrocasa via Oh Gizmo!]

* Of course, the Oompa-Loompas don’t really need juice to stay orange. It’s a little-known fact that the actors were hired from Florida, and their skin was colored orange by the dangerous and curiously fade-resistant fake tan popular there in the 1930s. Despite an estimated budget of almost $3 million, producing studio MGM decided against using more makeup to reverse the effects.

See Also:

• Oranges Make Tires Green(er)
• Review: Sharp LCD TV Produces More Oranges Than Florida
• Fruit Ninja: how big is that fruit?
• Funky Worms Cause Ants to Mimic Fruit

The handy meter gets into the flow

One sure sign that the news-desert of August is almost upon us is that concept designs outnumber real new products. With this in mind, take a look the the Handy Meter, a digital measure for your faucet that looks more useful than some of the real gadgets you can buy in your local department store.

The device, designed by Jeon Hwan Soo, slips onto the end of the faucet and measures the flow of water. The total amount delivered is displayed on an LED readout. The idea is that you can measure water into a recipe straight from the tap instead of going via a measuring jug.

Or can you? The “instructions” for this widget only show it counting the cubic centimeters as they flow through. Thus, unless you are letting the water drip drip slowly into the waiting receptacle, you might want to measure into another container anyway, just in case you go too far.

To be truly useful, you should be able to set the volume first, and have the flow cut when it is reached. Otherwise its quicker just to use a graduated jug.

The Handy Meter isn’t confined to the kitchen sink, though. You can also put it over the opening of a bottle for accurate dosing. True accuracy would require liquid of the same density as water, though.

Like I said, this isn’t a real product, but I’d probably buy one just so I could eyeball things like water for boiling pasta. It’s certainly better than junk like the Egg Cracker.

See Also:

• Strawberry Slicer: Most Useless Kitchen Gadget Yet?
• Today's Useless Kitchen Gadget: The Egg Cracker
• Kitchen Physics
• Kitchen Kit Lets One-Handed Cooks Slice and Dice
• The Only Five Kitchen Tools You Really Need

Cold-brewed coffee is the right place to start for great iced-coffee

Cold-brewing is yet another way to make a great cup of coffee. The idea is that the long, slow process, without heating, gives coffee with less bitterness and acidity than conventional hot-water methods. Of course, you probably won’t want to drink it to warm you up on a miserable winter morning, but for making iced-coffee, it’s ideal.

The easiest (and classic New Orleans way) is to just mix up a pack of grounds with cold water and leave it at room temperature for 12 hours. Strain, and you have around 8 cups of concentrate which will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

Or you can spend $265 on this admittedly beautiful cold water dripper. Made by Hario, it looks like something from a science lab. The kit has enough parts that you can really enjoy setting it up and tweaking everything before the four-hour process begins.

The machine has three layers. Up top is the water reservoir with silicone seal and a stainless steel tap which drip, drip drips the water slowly on the ground coffee below. Here it extracts the coffee goodness and passes through a French-press-like metal mesh filter into the jug below. When the water has finally finished its journey, you have a jar of concentrate ready to go.

I certainly don’t have space in my tiny kitchen for such an elegant rig, but I’m going to be scrubbing a stainless steel saucepan clean later today and cold-brewing a batch of concentrate the ghetto way. For those of you who just can’t bring themselves to slum it like me, the Hario Cold Water Dripper is available now.

Hario Cold Water Dripper [Williams Sonoma via Uncrate]

See Also:

• Make Terrible Drip-Brewed Coffee at Camp with the Propane …
• Steel Disk Replaces Paper Aeropress Coffee Filters
• Loca Brews Pod Coffee in a Stovetop Moka
• Smart Holder Carries Infinite Cups of Coffee
• Set Perfect White-Balance With Starbucks Coffee-Cup Lid

The Kitchen Tool turns any old utensil into one half of a pair of tongs

Konstantin Slawinski’s little silicone widget could soon become one of the most useful gadgets in your kitchen (or in the back yard, if you have a grill). It’s a rubber hinge with two holes into which you slot any utensils you might have to hand, instantly turning them into a pair of one-handed tongs.

A fork and spoon can become salad servers, a pair of table knives can be used to flip burgers or any other frying food, and two chopsticks can be handily joined for those who lack either dexterity or the willingness to learn anything new.

Slawinski sells designs in kitchen stores worldwide, but the brand new “Kitchen Tool” isn’t showing up yet. In the meantime, I shall visit my local catering supplies establishment and search for any cheap chunk of silicone that I can pierce to make my own Kitchen Tool.

Kitchen Tool product page [Kitchen Slawinski via Studio Dreimann and Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• The Gadget Lab Summer BBQ Guide
• Art Lebedev Turns Utensils into Giant Folding Knife
• Life's Too Short: Modular Silicone Kitchen Drawer Organizers …
• Silicon Strips Shield Sizzling Stove-Shelves