Russo's New York Pizzeria is shaking things up a bit...but adding breakfast to its menu.  The pizzeria known for giant slices of pizza and amazing pastas will now serve breakfast on Saturday and Sundays from 8am until 11am.  Brett Steiner with Russo's tells me they will serve omlettes, pancakes and at least two different kinds of French toast.  Steiner says they make their batter from scratch...and the Italian French toast is a must-try.  You can get the Empire State pancake stack or a Wall Street bagel with cream cheese and lox...plus many more breakfast favorites.  This is not a buffet.  Brett also tells me breakfast orders come with free Mimosas and Bellinis.   

There's a reason why "pink slime in the ice machine" rears its ugly head so often on Memphis-Shelby County restaurant inspection reports.

The ice machine is one of the "hot spots" on a health department environmentalist's checklist, according to Tom Powell, a former Mid-South restaurateur.

"The mold on the door, no one likes to clean it, or many are unsure how to adequately clean it without chemically contaminating the ice,” Powell said.

That's not the first area that should be inspected, though, he said.

According to Powell, right after the front door, a health inspector should walk in the walk-in cooler.

“Boxes of fruit or produce that are left in the walk-in cooler are often forgotten if the stock is not rotated,” he said. “Then you have rotting produce in the cooler.”

Food temperatures are a "hot spot," too, for obvious reasons.

Think of a restaurant menu as a maze -- designed to wind not you, but your money out the exit.

Gregg Rapp is a Palm Springs, CA, menu "engineering" consultant. He has designed menus for everything from fancy Hong Kong hotels to your neighborhood Taco Bell.

Rapp told one of my trusted consumer resources, Bottom Line Secrets magazine, that restaurants regularly use sleight-of-hand in their menu lay-outs. Each trick, Rapp said, is designed to persuade customers to spend more.

"The human eye tends to go first to the upper right-hand corner of a page," Rapp told BLS. "That's where you can expect to find a menu's "stars" - restaurant lingo for popular entrees with the highest gross profit margins.

"The upper right-hand corner won't necessarily display the most expensive things on the menu, only the most profitable. That's because highlighting a costly porterhouse steak or lobster might scare customers away."