Restaurants

I like Yelp. The review site can be a nifty way to check out a restaurant before risking a meal. But is Yelp also a shakedown racket for merchants? Some restaurant owners say the San Francisco company is unusually aggressive in trying to get businesses to pay hundreds of dollars in monthly "sponsorship" fees to improve their ranking in search results and to move their most positive review to the top of the page.

Lighting up on the outdoor patios of cafes and coffee shops may soon be a thing of the past in Los Angeles. The city's arts and parks committee took a first step Wednesday toward a new ban on smoking on restaurant patios or within 10 feet of any outdoor establishment that serves food or beverages. Bars with outdoor areas and other over-18 venues would be exempt.

Happy hour is getting happier, and that's making restaurants sadder. As the recession drags on, drinkers such as Luis Romero of Anaheim are gravitating to happy hour -- that late-afternoon period when bars and restaurants sell discounted drinks and food to attract customers during what otherwise would be a slow time. "You start watching your pennies a bit more," said Romero as he sipped a $3.

For all the restaurants opening downtown lately, Little Tokyo has been in need of something new and unexpected. (Johnny Rockets doesn't count.) Enter restaurateur Michael Cardenas and chef Josef Centeno, who are planning to open a 60-seat restaurant in the Sakura Crossing building on San Pedro Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets. The place, Lazy Ox, is envisioned as an "innovative neighborhood canteen."

Nine people sickened by a salmonella outbreak linked to fresh tomatoes ate at two restaurants from the same chain, federal officials confirmed Friday. The chain's name and restaurant location are confidential, said David Acheson, the associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, during a conference call with reporters. A spokesman for the agency also declined to provide the time frame for the cases -- or say whether the restaurants were in the same state. The Chicago Department of Public Health identified nine people who ate at a restaurant in May and came down with salmonella, though Tim Hadac, a spokesman for the department, said he did not know whether the nine cases were the same ones Acheson referenced Friday.

Zov Karamardian started her popular Orange County restaurant, Zov's Bistro, as mostly a takeout restaurant with four tables, three employees and one of the few female chefs in the county. Now 22 years later, with a staff of 200 and a 13,000-square-foot operation, Karamardian is championing the first Orange County Restaurant Week, running Sunday through Feb. 28 at more than 75 neighborhood cafes, fine-dining rooms and luxury hotels countywide.

Leftovers from San Francisco Bay Area restaurants may soon help power the region. The East Bay Municipal Utility District has created a program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, to generate electricity from the methane gas produced by food decomposition. Engineers have been testing and refining the process since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the utility $50,000 in 2006 to study it, and they plan to sell energy to the grid beginning next year.

Nearly everyone on Google Inc.'s sprawling campus here knows Thunder Parley, at least by reputation. But it's not his unusual name, outgoing personality or skills as a software engineer that make him stand out. He is the most famous foodie at a company that takes gastronomy nearly as seriously as Web-search algorithms. Parley was raised in a small New England town on Life cereal and SpaghettiOs. He used to think Taco Bell was authentic Mexican fare, and he never ate salmon except out of a can.

Curry Mendes moved to Los Angeles last week from New York, where he had picked restaurants based on word of mouth and Zagat reviews. But he quickly learned that many people in L.A. choose restaurants based on the big letter grade affixed by the L.A. County Department of Public Health to the front of nearly 38,000 restaurants and other businesses that sell food ready to eat.

AS dragons run and dance down Bolsa Avenue in Westminster during this Saturday's Tet parade celebrating the lunar New Year, the restaurants of Little Saigon will be opening their doors to floods of revelers. Many of the thousands of Vietnamese Americans who throng to the district for the holiday carnivals, concerts and events will head for favorite places that cook the regional dishes they grew up eating.