Sometimes, dear readers, opening the food section is a little bit like checking a friend's fridge when you are not sure what you want to eat: Maybe you love everything you see, and maybe there is only a carton of eggs and a few strange containers of leftovers. Hot Plates knows your time is too precious to eat boring food, so here is your weekly food-news tasting menu.

Dueling Celebrities

The New York Times's top feature is a reporter's day spent shopping and cooking with "high priestess of the local" Alice Waters, and The Washington Post leads off with a profile of Fox reality-show winner Rock Harper, who just moved to Vegas to become the head chef of Green Valley Ranch Resort, Spa and Casino. With the Waters piece, you'll feel wholesome, nourished and sated at the end, and the Rock Harper piece has a more MTV feel to it.

Cheap Wine and Bloody Steak

Pretty much everything on the New York Times's front page will get your taste buds excited. The review of Peter Luger Steak House features the fabulous headline "The Original Master of Blood and Butter," which refers to the way steaks are cooked at the Brooklyn meat palace. Writer Frank Bruni, never one to mince words when he has a bone to pick, says the restaurant can "blush" because it has been so heavily imitated, but it should not "gloat" or "coast" because the food needs to be "more consistent" and the service "less dismissive."

Everyone, except maybe the biggest wine snobs, has to love wine writer Eric Asimov for his "Happiness for $10 or Less" column this week, which gives Hot Plates and other like-minded wine fiends a tasting report to clip and save for that right-before-payday time. Bargain wines that even the NYT will stand behind? These picks -- only two of which are American wines -- might be hard to find after today. (We might skip one of the items, a Cotes-du-Ventoux 2005, which Asimov says starts off with an "aroma of burnt rubber.")

While you're out, hit the butcher counter and buy a skirt steak to make the recipe that goes along with this bargain wine report; Florence Fabricant says "the screw cap on a budget red" is a great companion for a plate of spicy, pan-sauteed rare meat.

Wine-Nerd Alert

If you, like Hot Plates, are part of a neighborhood wine-tasting club, you will be thankful for the Washington Post for pointing out in its wine column that premium glass brand Riedel has come out with a line of (very expensive) opaque black tasting glasses for a serious at-home blind tasting. Thankfully, since you probably have more than four fellow winos to serve, Crate and Barrel has brought out a cheapie, stemless version for just $3. The Post wine column highlights wines to drink with oysters, which is nice since we are, by the way, halfway through the first "R" month.

Settle in and read the L.A. Times's terrific piece about mechanical harvesters in Napa, which is about "a sense of unease" that there will not be enough human hands for picking at critical times. It is sort of an "explainer" piece not just about the problem of vineyard help, but about what the machines actually do.

A note on a more savory drink: the Post Spirits column is about aquavit -- "basically a vodka flavored with spices and herbs such as caraway, fennel, dill, coriander and anise" and consumed ice-cold with smoked or pickled fish. Yum.

For beer drinkers, The Dallas Morning News has a fun guide to Oktoberfest that is educational and will get anyone in the mood for meat, music, merriment, and a keg of hearty brew.

Bye Bye, Geezer Chic, Hello Modern Makeover

Anyone who's been to the stately Greenbrier hotel in West Virginia may want to make another trip, if they are going for the food and not just the decor: a costly renovation will give visitors a tasting-menu restaurant, Hemisphere, in place of its old dining room. The Post says the change is being made partly because the owners want their five-star rating back from the Mobil Travel Guide, which took away the ranking in 2000.

Virtue and Romance Collide

Can they? Abode in Santa Monica, run by Dominique Crenn, gets a lively review, which is a nice way of saying the writer has a tough time with the place. It's really fun to read, however, as she pokes fun artfully at the place's creativity in overdrive. Abode gets half a star and does not sound like a good pick for anyone looking for what it bills itself as -- a kitchen that uses only sustainable goods from the Santa Monica farmer's market.

The kitchen spends "too much time with arts and crafts projects," like "mustard frost" on the side of the dish as an accent -- over the top in the wrong way, the writer contends. The bit about the "prosciutto and melon" is great. A killer line: "Many chefs want to become fashionable; some become fashion victims."

The Sky(scraper?) Is Falling

So, guess what?  "City dwellers who raise chickens are springing up around the country." Some even say chickens are "the gateway animal for urban farming." Holy cow, that's funny, but it seems to be a genuine trend. This story is full of humorous bits, like the phrase "clandestine coops," the reference to books on the topic as "chick lit" and the quote from the animal control rep in Boston who wouldn't go on the record with his name, but said "We catch them all the time ... there's chickens all over the place."

A Gay Sports Bar, and Some Meat in a Box

Washington food critic Tom Sietsema reviews a new upscale "gay watering hole" in his First Bite column. Sounds like fun: 10 plasma TV screens, a rooftop deck, and a very cute Latin-flavored comfort food menu. Sounds like a stomachache: macaroni-and-cheese fritters.

OK, we know, it's a little juvenile, but we still giggle about that heavily forwarded Saturday Night Live skit with a certain song performed by pop tart Justin Timberlake and comedian Andy Samberg -- you know the one. Well, restaurant critic Peter Meehan of The New York Times reviews Timberlake's new restaurant, Southern Hospitality, and he sneaks in a couple of jokes for those in the know.

He starts the review by saying that the best thing on the menu "comes in a box" -- the ribs. And near the end of the review,  he starts off a paragraph by saying "But for all the fellas out there with a lady to impress" (lyrics from the infamous song performed by Timberlake in the SNL bit), the restaurant does a few things well. With funnies like this in the paper, it kind of feels like Friday.