NEW YORK, Sept 12, 2007 (AFP) - A US judge has shot down a New York City health regulation that would have required around 2,000 fast food outlets and restaurants to display how many calories their meals contain.

The New York State Restaurant Association brought a lawsuit in June challenging the regulations, which were adopted in December but delayed due to the lawsuit and would have applied to around 10 percent of New York's eateries.

PARIS, Sept 6, 2007 (AFP) - Veteran chef Fredy Girardet, ranked one of the masters of 20th century French cuisine, launched a sizzling attack on the avant-garde techniques known as 'molecular gastronomy', in an interview published Thursday.

Some chefs 'believe modernity is about turning their kitchen into a laboratory,' the 70-year-old Swiss, who retired in 1996 after inspiring a generation of chefs around the world, told Le Monde newspaper.

TOKYO, Sept 4, 2007 (AFP) - Soy sauce is such a staple of the Japanese diet that now it's even being put on ice cream.

A Japanese company has made a surprise hit by creating a special blend for ice cream -- said to taste a bit like caramel.

Yamakawa Jozo, established in 1943 and based in the central city of Gifu, said it has sold nearly 6,000 bottles of the soy sauce for ice cream since January, with daily orders picking up to between 70 and 80 a day.

BERLIN, Aug 22, 2007 (AFP) - After the mafia-style murder of six Italians in a working-class city on the Rhine last week, Germany's many Italian restaurants are living in fear -- for their image.

'My customers have been asking me: 'So how much protection money do you have to pay?'' Pino Bianco, the owner of Berlin's chic A Muntagnola restaurant, said indignantly.

Bianco and others in the German capital are not taking lying down what they see as the fast-spreading assumption that where there is pizza and pasta there must be mafia.

PARIS, July 29, 2007 (AFP) - The title of Pixar's latest animated film Ratatouille loosely translates as 'a mish-mash of vegetables.' That doesn't stop people in southern France, particularly Nice where the dish originated, from having vehement opinions about how it should be prepared.

Classic books on Provencal and Nicois cooking agree on the vegetables that should go into ratatouille: tomato, onion, bell pepper, aubergine and courgette, with the occasional recipe calling for a little potato.

PARIS, July 29, 2007 (AFP) - Two chefs per diner, stringent hygiene and an almost military-style hierarchy and discipline -- such is life in the kitchens of Paris' top-end restaurants, the subject of Hollywood's just-released blockbuster animation 'Ratatouille'.

Take the Crillon, the luxury hotel a stone's throw from the Seine where the cheapest room is 615 euros (839 dollars) a night with suites up to 8,000. Deep in its under-belly down flights of steps, chef Jean-Francois Piege lords over 'a brigade' of 72 cooks whipping up gourmet platters for the hotel and its restaurant.

GENEVA, July 23, 2007 (AFP) - Switzerland has asked the neighbouring European Union to grant protected status to its best known hole-less cheese, gruyere, after France made a similar bid for French-made cheeses bearing the same name and holes.

The Swiss agriculture department said it was trying to ensure that the hard cheese made in the western Swiss region of Gruyere benefitted from 'Protected Designation of Origin' status throughout the EU.

The official label ensures that only cheeses produced in a particular geographical area in a specific way can carry that name.