Who has the testicular fortitude to take on city's best ballers? (Image: Gotham Nurse)

Caplansky’s Delicatessen is holding its inaugural “Battle of the Bubbies” competition this Sunday in search of the city’s best matzo ball maker. Chief mensch Zane Caplansky points out that the competition is open to anyone—not just bubbies—and there will be two categories to compete under: cannon balls (hard balls) and fluffy balls (soft balls). For the record, Caplansky himself likes the fluffy balls. The judges include Moses Znaimer, Bonnie Stern, David Sax, Lara Rabinovitch and Amy Wilson, so it’s quite clear that these people will know what goes in a good matzo, unlike most food competitions out there (remember when Antonio Sabato Jr. was a judge on Iron Chef?).

The competition starts at 4 p.m. on September 10 at the deli. Contestants must pre-register by calling the restaurant, which just celebrated its first year at its current digs.

Extra incentive: all competitors get a free lunch.

• Caplansky’s Deli

(Image: McClelland and Stewart)

Local boy and Toronto Life contributor David Sax won a James Beard Award for his much-lauded book Save the Deli yesterday. He blogs today on the Save the Deli Web site:

It was a wild night. I haven’t shvitzed that intensely since I was at a Russian banya. There was every kind of treyf you could imagine, great friends from the food world, and enough mixed alcohol to give me a hangover for the rest of today (hence, the late entry).

It wouldn’t be a good celebration without a debilitating hangover the following morning. In fact, the party was so good (the crowd apparently went wild when Sax won) that the James Beard Foundation has yet to post an official list of winners, but it did live tweet the ceremony and has a list of winners on its blog. The other Canadian to take home honours was Laura Calder, celebrated for her Food Network Canada show French Food at Home.

The awards conclude tonight, when the winners of the restaurant and chef categories will be announced. One Canuck is in the running: Paul Grieco of New York’s Hearth is up for most influential guy in the booze biz.

• Save the Deli Wins a James Beard Award! [Save the Deli]

• Highlights from the James Beard Award nominations [National Post]

Chinatown: the land of better buns (Photo by John Vetterli)

New Yorkers are never happy when someone suggests that they’re not the best at something. Case in point: when David Sax asserted that the best Jewish delis are in L.A., not New York, flurries of incredulous aggregate posts popped up everywhere. The Gothamist, in a tongue-in-cheek headline, went so far as to suggest Sax had a death wish in speaking his mind. But it turns out that NYC may have—God forbid—an inferior Chinatown to Toronto.

“Friends back in Toronto love listening to me lament the ways New York City falls short compared to my Canadian hometown,” writes the Wall Street Journal‘s Adrian Ho. “I’m glad to oblige, every six weeks or so, whenever I return for my fill of real Chinese food. Why is it so difficult to find a decent dumpling in this town?”

The answer, he hypothesizes, is simple: immigration laws. In light of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, Ho surmises, Hong Kong residents in the late  ’80s and early ’90s found locales like Toronto appealing as destinations, due in no small part to the relative ease of gaining “entrepreneur immigrant” status in Canada (in which citizenship can be obtained in as little as three years). Entrepreneurs came and set up shop, creating a backbone of familiarity that attracted more immigrants. It’s a cycle that makes sure the cuisine is authentic and geared toward respective ethnicities rather than tourists.

Still, non-believers abound. Says one WSJ reader: “If you’re looking for good Chinese food in Chinatown NYC, you’re a fool. All but the most naive of tourists knows the best Chinese food in NYC is NOT in Chinatown. Just as the best Italian food is not in Little Italy.”

Is that a roundabout admission of defeat? We think so.

• New York Times writer Micheline Maynard visits Ottawa’s Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute to see if it lives up to its worldwide reputation. There, she experiences the highs and lows of professional cooking, including a successful lobster in verbena cream sauce, and a not-so-successful platter of skate. [New York Times]

• An Anglo-Indian chef has created what he calls the world’s healthiest meal. The spicy plate of chicken and blueberry curry with goji berry rice pilaf is 20 times healthier than any specially formulated meal, experts say. Each serving contains the nutritional equivalent of 49 helpings of spinach, and eating it once a week could deal a “devastating blow” to cancer and Alzheimer’s. [Telegraph]

• Deli gurus David Sax and Zane Caplansky interview each other on the Post’s Appetizer blog. Sax queries Caplansky on the growing pains of starting a delicatessen on College Street, and Caplansky delves into the evolution of Sax’s book, from its inception as Hold the Mustard to Death of the Deli to its current title, Save the Deli. [National Post]

• Farmville, a Facebook game in which users grow their own “delicious” fruits and vegetables (yes, apparently digital produce can taste good), has become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. The game appears to be just as addictive as the social networking site itself. One anonymous blogger, who said she was pregnant, had this to say of her spouse’s addiction: “I was starving…and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could harvest his raspberries!” [New York Times]