Fat Guy

To me, that's the crux of it. The choice of where to eat is zero sum: you have a finite number of nice meals out per year, and any time you choose to dine at one restaurant, you're also choosing not to dine at any other restaurant for that meal. You also -- unless you're well-to-do or in some way subsidized -- have a finite number of dining dollars and every meal choice represents an allocation of those dollars. So, in the first place, when I choose a place to dine and I'm paying out of my own limited funds I always have to ask questions like, "This meal was good, interesting and worthwhile, but was it a better choice than Jean Georges at the same price?" There are enough restaurants in New York City where I know I'll always have a superb experience that it's hard for me to justify dropping hundreds of dollars on a meal that could easily suck. I understand all the exceptions that, in my opinion, prove the rule. Those of us who make allowances in order to support avant garde cuisine or other worthy (to us) causes are making a choice, and I respect that choice (and make it too). I also recommend lunch, Restaurant Week, etc., as low risk ways to try new places -- you get a taste. And of course, if every one of your extreme gourmet friends, or everyone in the eGullet Society, is saying the place is great, you should go. But that's not the predominant scenario. Most people are just really into trying what's new, for the sake of trying what's new. And I think that leads to a lot of bad choices. I especially think that arguments like "If we don't support new restaurants, they won't survive" are specious. Or, at least, they apply equally to all restaurants. If everybody stopped going to Jean Georges and instead always supported new restaurants, there would be no Jean Georges. New restaurants have an audience. There are plenty of people to whom risking a few hundred dollars is no big deal, and there are plenty of people who have corporate and otherwise subsidized dining budgets. Let them be the primary supporters of new, untested restaurants.

I hate when that happens, because it means I'm not going to be good buddies with the server -- I'm going to have to go around him or her; they shouldn't put you in that position. So, you just have to say, "We'd like to speak to the sommelier about our wine order, please." If the restaurant has a sommelier, you shouldn't feel bad about asking to speak to the sommelier. What the heck else is the sommelier there for? If the server says, "Is there anything I can answer," just smile and repeat yourself, "We'd like to speak to the sommelier about our wine order, please." Don't feel bad about it. Indeed, if you feel the server has been obstructionist, you should mention it to the sommelier. That's not a situation I've ever come across. BYO isn't all that common in New York, and when I'm traveling elsewhere I don't have access to my wine collection (if you can call it that). So I'm not particularly experienced when it comes to BYO etiquette. Someone else is going to have to chime in here. Is this something that's done? My guess is no, but I don't really know.

Find the manager with the best English in the place and be super pushy about your desire for real stuff. Say exactly what you want: "We want the real Chinese stuff, not the stuff for round eyes, dammit. What's the best stuff?" "We want it Thai spicy, really like Thai people eat it, not like Americans. I mean it. Thai spicy, okay? Really." That usually does the trick.

I had the pleasure of dining at Enoteca Vin in October, and I was blown away by the place. Raleigh is incredibly lucky to have this culinary resource. I liked everything about the restaurant, from the house-made charcuterie to the attitude of the waitstaff (well, I confess I found the desserts to be substantially below the level of everything else, but that was the one flaw).

That's the right thing to do. It doesn't even have to be light conversation. Assuming you're not discussing matters critical to the national security of sommeliers or describing in graphic detail sexual fantasies that involve sommeliers, you can just continue with whatever conversation you were having before the sommelier showed up. Restaurant service should be mostly transparent, unless the customer chooses otherwise. If you want to engage the sommelier, discuss the wine, etc., you should certainly feel free to do that. But if you don't want there to be a disruption, it should go like this: 1- the sommelier presents the bottle, you look at the label and nod in the affirmative, 2- you keep right on going with your table conversation while the bottle is opened, 3- when the sommelier pours a taste, you smell it, taste it and say, "Thank you," to indicate that it's not defective, 4- you keep talking to your tablemates.

You can just hand over a $10 or $20 bill on your way out (or more if you were drinking hundreds of dollars worth of wine). It's not strictly necessary to tip sommeliers, though. The sommelier is almost always either a) part of the waitstaff and therefore gets a share of the tip pool anyway (in any modern restaurant with sommeliers, captains, front waiters, back waiters, bussers, etc. -- a full service staff, as opposed to a waitress at a diner -- tips are pooled and allocated per shift) or b) is a member of management and therefore not a tipped employee (some sommeliers who are members of management will reject a cash tip, some will contribute it to the waitstaff tip pool, and some will keep it -- it depends). So I generally only tip the sommelier independently if the nature of the assistance has been super-special, and then I might not use cash but, rather, some sort of gift. A Laguiole corkscrew is always nice if a sommelier has planned a special wine tasting for you, or has arranged a VIP tour at a vineyard, or has given you great service over many visits.

There are limits to what the human mind and body can endure, and I’m sure you’ll agree we exceeded those limits yesterday. We started at 4:30am, so we could get showered and mostly packed before waking PJ up, addressing his morning needs, doing the rest of the packing and hitting the road. (It wasn’t possible to do all the packing the night before – there were too many dependencies with respect to baby stuff we’d need in the morning, refrigerated stuff, bags that couldn’t be closed until one last thing was added, etc.) We made it as far as the Fairhaven, MA, exit before PJ needed further attention, so we pulled off and, lo and behold, there was the Fairhaven Wal-Mart. This was not one of the nicer Wal-Marts (Fairhaven and the surrounding areas – New Bedford, Fall River – seem pretty depressed) but it did have a little cafeteria area in which to feed PJ. At this point it was 9-something in the morning and we already felt ready to drop dead. PJ found it all highly entertaining, though. The one bummer about the Fairhaven exit was that there weren’t any decent coffee and doughnut places, and in our emotional state at the time this was a major issue for us. We got back on the highway feeling defeated, however at the very next exit, New Bedford (pronounced “New Bed-faahd” if you’re actually from there), there was a sign for a Dunkin’ Donuts so we figured that would do. Then, a pleasant surprise ensued: Ellen spied, right across the street from the Dunkin’ Donuts, a totally crummy looking place called Honey Dew, which seemed to be the equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts but indigenous to the region, and had a lot more cars in its parking lot. Also, right up the street from the Honey Dew was a Shell station with gas for $2.80 a gallon – unheard of in this part of the country right now (it was well over $3 everywhere else we got gas on this trip). Honey Dew did not disappoint. Not only were the accents of the cashiers amazingly genuine “Can aah help who’s next he-ah!” but also the doughnuts were superb. I tried a few items, the best of which was the “honey dip stick,” kind of like a glazed cruller but not twisted. I took a photo of it resting on my leg as Ellen drove. We made it to New Haven, CT, around lunchtime and, after visiting an ailing relative, we went to Ellen’s parents’ house for a light lunch. The basil, tomatoes and cucumbers were coming in, and Ellen’s mother procured some fresh local corn, so we had salad, corn and some leftover Sally’s pizza from the night before (Sally’s is not open for lunch). We left New Haven around 3pm and got back to Manhattan around 5pm. It took a solid half hour to unload the car, which gave us 30 minutes to get cleaned up and changed for the evening’s event. The evening’s event? Yes, you are now basically at the half-way point of our day yesterday. We still had a party to go to in Quogue. Those of you familiar with New York geography will probably have dropped something or spit milk out your noses by now. For those of you who aren’t, Quogue is a beach community and barrier island way out on the South shore of Long Island. It’s part of the area known as the Hamptons, and many people will tell you that Quogue (pronounced “Qwog”) is the nicest part of the Hamptons. Anyway, Quogue is really nice, but it takes about two hours to drive there from Manhattan, even though everybody in Quogue has collectively agreed to lie and say it’s “Only 90 minutes from Manhattan!” We rallied for this expedition, however, because my friend Shelley Clark, who is one of the premier publicists in the hospitality industry, told us this was to be the event of the summer, and when Shelley says something is to be the event of the summer, it will be. Maybe it wasn’t the event of the summer. It felt more like the event of the century thus far. The primary purpose of the event was that it was an “awareness raiser” (which is kind of like a fundraiser without the overt fundraising pitches) for the Miami-based Diabetes Research Institute, hosted at the oceanfront home (more like an ocean liner on land, but still technically a home) of Jill and Cliff Viner. A secondary purpose of the event – the reason it was of interest to food media – was to showcase the Barton G. events company and its new chef Richard Blais. Some of you might remember Richard Blais, who was until recently the Atlanta equivalent of avant-garde chefs Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, et al. Barton G., one of the top event caterers in the world (owned by former figure skater Barton G. Weiss), has just recruited Blais (and his wife) and moved them down to Miami. Barton G. and Blais were at the event, and the food situation was totally out of control, over the top, decadent and unusual – I kept thinking it was like Ferran Adria’s bar mitzvah. There were a number of food stations, some of which were showcasing “molecular gastronomy” and others of which were just serving really good normal food. Blais and his wife were handling the “liquid nitrogen martini bar” and a station serving transglutimate noodles in three varieties. The liquid nitrogen martinis and cocktails were centered around little steaming white cylinders of frozen vodka (yes, you can freeze Vodka solid – if you happen to have a 400-pound tank of liquid nitrogen at your disposal). The vodka would slowly melt into the cocktail, making it stronger as it would melt – just the opposite of how melting ice normally affects a cocktail. Blais’s lovely wife patiently demonstrated the creation of one of these cocktails, while I photographed it badly. This is the noodle station. The noodles were made from proteins like shrimp and chicken, not from grain. The shrimp ones were particularly tasty. The thing that was so neat, and amusing, about these stations was that you see similar food plated preciously at the high-end avant-garde restaurants, but here they were doing it for 300+ people in a buffet format, like, no big deal, this is just the food we’re serving today. It was really incongruous and wonderful, and maybe even a sign of things to come. As I mentioned, there was also regular food, which was great too. Most noteworthy was the shellfish bar, where they took giant shrimp, lobster tails, king crab and blue crab and built seafood cocktails to order, with a choice of sauces. The display was overwhelmingly abundant, and so were the portions. I don’t often max out on shellfish. This may even have been the first time. There were several other stations, but another worth mentioning was the meat station, where they were grilling lamb chops, beef tenderloins and other stuff – you just walked up, asked for whatever you wanted, and they sliced it to order and gave you twice as much as you’d asked for. There was also the matter of dessert. After the assembled guests had gorged themselves on the savory cuisine, we all went downstairs to the dessert bar, which featured made-to-order liquid nitrogen ice creams and sorbets in flavors like black olive (and also in more familiar flavors), cotton candy and about a million pastries of all kinds. Here’s Blais in front of the liquid nitrogen ice cream window. What did all this have to do with diabetes? Well, all of this food, delicious as it was, was also part of a nutritional demonstration. All of the savory food was low-carb, and all the desserts were – get this – sugar free. Blais and I tasted and retasted the ice creams and sorbets together, discussed the matter and agreed that there was no way either of us could tell they were made with a sugar substitute (they were using a variant of Splenda). With most of the other desserts, we could detect differences – sometimes in texture, sometimes there was an aftertaste – but the stuff was still damn impressive. The moral of the story being that if Richard Blais, his wife, his pastry chef and Barton G. do all the cooking around your house you don’t really have to make any sacrifices, even if you have diabetes. Well, maybe the moral is something else. This is a copy of the planned menu, which is fairly accurate though there were a few last-minute changes. Close enough, though. The final event of the evening – I know, it never ends – was a rousing, heartfelt, intimate performance by the great Patti LaBelle, who has been living with diabetes for a decade, on a specially constructed stage over the pool. Then we had to drive home. My mother had been babysitting PJ and Momo, so I put her in a cab back to her apartment on the Upper West Side, took Momo out and collapsed in bed – I didn’t even have the strength to take my socks off. So, that’s it for my foodblog this week. Thanks, everyone, for reading along, and thanks to Susan in FL and the eG Foodblogs team for making it happen!

That was actually our second choice for the eGullet Society slogan. Sometimes I regret that we didn't go with it.

The week has been such a whirlwind of activity that I never even paused to consider how great the weather had been all week. Sunny and warm during the day; cool and breezy at night – it’s the kind of weather that makes one consider going to college in New England. Today, however, the weather was much more authentically New England-ish: rainy, damp and cold. We caught the last bits of sunlight on our morning walk on the beach, and got back in the car just as the storm clouds rolled in and started dumping rain. At the beach, the tide was low so several sandbars popped up. Momo, I hasten to add, fierce though he may look, is terrified of water. Nonetheless, Ellen was able to drag him out to a sandbar. Once on the sandbar, he considered escape, but that would have required getting his feet wet again. Eventually he made his peace with being on the sandbar, and he ran around while PJ had a good crawl. As a breakfast snack, I had a cup of steaming hot leftover lobster bisque. We traveled back to Orleans at brunchtime, this time to the actual town of Orleans as opposed to the strip area where the Stop and Shop is. (Although, we did make it back to the Christmas Tree Shops on the way out of town, where we got, for $1.99 a box, better and more saltwater taffy than you get for $7 at the ripoff places in Provincetown, and also some nice jam made by Trappist monks.) Orleans is great – I think were I to have a Cape Cod vacation home, I’d want it to be in Orleans. Not that I’d ever want a vacation home anywhere, even if I could afford one and even if I had the patience to deal with all the headaches of maintaining a vacation home. I much prefer short visits to other people’s vacation homes. We had brunch at Sparrow’s (the full and correct name of the place is the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, but people just call it Sparrow’s), which was a change of pace from the steady diet of fried seafood, subs and cones of the past few days. Sparrow’s serves actual food. It’s mostly a dessert and coffee place, with a small menu of high-quality panini and breakfast sandwiches. Ellen had a turkey, roasted red pepper and pesto panini (or whatever the singular of panini is); I had a ham, egg and cheese sandwich (the signage was emphatic on the point that the eggs were free range – perhaps that gives a sense of the style of the place); and PJ had bits and pieces of everything – he particularly enjoyed a piece of the bread with pesto on it. We also had a cranberry scone and a piece of crumb cake. Everything was good, but the panini and the scone really stood out. Oh, the place has pretty good coffee. My sister made dinner tonight. The original plan was for linguine with clams, and that did happen, but the menu somehow proliferated to include lobsters, corn, steamers, Caesar salad, pizza and other stuff, and also four guests (my brother-in-law’s cousin, wife and two kids). Actually, the original plan was to grill outside, but the meteorological situation made that impossible, which turned out to be a nice piece of culinary luck because the dinner we had was better than what we would have grilled. My sister’s method for linguine with clams is highly effective: a box of linguine cooked very al dente (because it will cook more and absorb the sauce) and drained, tossed in a pot with a generous amount of olive oil and a stick of butter, very little garlic, oregano, a jar of clam juice, a cup of wine, some grated parmesan and a lot of pepper. Then add about 30 steamed clams, some shucked and some left whole, a ton of parsley, and more parmesan and pepper at the end. Tonight’s preparation was a double recipe. (Rookie’s pizza in Wellfleet is, by the way, not nearly as good as George’s pizza in Provincetown. Which is not to say that George’s is all that good either.) My sister insisted that I transcribe the following quote from her: “My life’s ambition is to have a recipe on my brother’s website. Now I’ve achieved it, and there’s nowhere to go but down.” A terminology note there: Everyone in my family insists on referring to the eGullet Society as my website, as in “How’s your website? Does it make any money?” no matter how many times I explain that the eGullet Society is not a website but is, rather, a not-for-profit public charity for which I work, alongside a staff of volunteers from around the world, in which I have no ownership interest of any kind, that among other things (like the eG Scholarships program) offers several web services like eG Forums, the eGullet Culinary Institute, the Daily Gullet, eG Spotlight Conversations, etc. They actually get annoyed if I try to explain this, like it’s a problem I have. Also as part of the dinner event, I made vodka gimlets, which are the only cocktails I know how to make that Ellen likes. I’m a partisan of gimlets made with a combination of fresh lime juice and Rose’s lime juice. Without the Rose’s, it’s just not a gimlet, but with only Rose’s it lacks freshness. We capped off the evening with ice cream from Mac’s. I confess, the mint chocolate chip ice cream at Mac’s is extraordinary, because the chips are like little mini versions of Andes mints – you know, with the chocolate on one side and mint goo on the other. I don’t suppose Mac’s makes its own ice cream, but whichever supplier they chose, they chose well. Tomorrow will be a travel day for us: extremely early departure from the Cape (Saturday is the day most rental houses turn over, so you’ve got to leave early to beat the traffic), a visit with the inlaws in New Haven, CT, and then back to New York City. I’ll post a wrap-up late tomorrow night or early the following morning.

Especially with a goat. And for the record my physique don't lie either.

Without having seen the financials I can only guess, but I imagine that if you were to open Alinea in Manhattan -- with Manhattan rent, wages and other operating costs -- you'd have to charge a lot more money for dinner than Alinea does in a residential Chicago neighborhood. There are no equivalent neighborhoods in Manhattan -- you'd probably have to look in Brooklyn to find something similar, but because New York isn't so much of a suburban/car culture even the best restaurants in Brooklyn don't draw Manhattan guests in sufficient numbers, and since Manhattan is also the gateway to all the tourist business in New York, and since tourists rarely leave Manhattan, that business just isn't there in Brooklyn. The only possible exception I can think of is Peter Luger, though I'm not really sure what percentage of the customers on any given night are in from Manhattan. Anyway, the point being . . . maybe New York customers (in sufficient numbers to support a restaurant) would pay the cost of dinner at Alinea-in-Chicago to have an Alinea-quality meal in New York. But would they pay the cost of dinner at Ducasse to have that meal? I don't really know the answer to either hypothetical, though I imagine it goes yes and no.

Oh, you must be assuming we don't always eat this way!

Papillon probably had as or nearly as low a price point you can have for labor-intensive, creative cuisine in a Manhattan location, and while not in the East Village it was down on Hudson St. around 11th. I think the more fundamental issue is that New York just isn't ready to support avant-garde cuisine in a serious way. Maybe New Yorkers would support it if the economics of Chicago were transplanted into a New York neighborhood, or maybe not even then, but for whatever reason the only place that has had any staying power here has been WD-50 and WD-50 is pretty well towards the tame end of the avant-garde spectrum. Assuming Oakapple has the cuisine pegged (I imagine he does, though I never made it to Gilt), I really doubt the Gilt-Paul experiment would have turned out differently if there had been fewer misses on the tasting menu. I was recently at a panel discussion about avant-garde cuisine and tableware, hosted by the Cooper-Hewitt (the design collection of the Smithsonian, in Manhattan), and I don't think it was lost on anyone there that the panel consisted of all chefs from Chicago and DC -- there was no New York representation, even though the venue was in New York. Wylie, Paul and maybe Will Goldfarb could potentially sit on such a panel and not be totally out of place, but I think if you step back from any sort of geographic loyalty it's hard to justify putting any of those guys on the list ahead of Achatz, Cantu and Andres (and that's not even bringing Adria, Blumenthal, This, et al. into the discussion).

PJ decided to do us the favor of getting up extra-early this morning, so we figured we’d go to the beach and try to tire him out. This was his first experience of actually crawling in sand, as opposed to being carried in the backpack. There was a loose plan in place to make lobster bisque for lunch, using the leftover carcasses from our lobster dinner the other night, however my sister and I decided we couldn’t wait any longer. So she made us “lobster scrambled eggs” for breakfast. We were lucky in that the guests the other night were not particularly resourceful or motivated lobster eaters, so there was a total of maybe a pound of meat still left on the lobsters. Basically, the improvised lobster scrambled eggs started as heavily reduced lobster bisque. Then my sister cooled the bisque and added some eggs. I was an observer, rather than a participant in the cooking, though I was occasionally consulted. I made the mistake of telling my sister I planned to be an observer, so of course she kept addressing me as “Mr. UN Observer” and may never stop Then she added butter that she cleverly kept from last night’s dinner to a skillet and poured in the bisque and egg mixture. She let them set a bit, then gently stirred. There wasn’t any good bread in the house, but there was a big box of Saltines, so the lobster scrambled eggs were served with Saltines and, on the side, a little cup of lobster bisque that functioned as sort of a sauce. This was probably the best thing I’ve eaten on this vacation, if not in my entire life. For lunch we went to Mac’s down on the pier. The place was seriously crowded but, surprisingly, the prices were lower than what seems to be the Cape average, the ingredients were super-high quality (the Mac’s people also own a seafood market), and the atmosphere felt very genuine old-school Cape. There was all sorts of fried stuff served, and we decided Mac’s onion rings were arguably better even than the ones at Arnold’s. I had a fried cod sandwich, in addition to tasting other stuff. Ellen had a grilled tuna filet sandwich, which was really nice. We ate outside at the picnic tables, which of all the picnic tables we’ve encountered on the Cape are by far the most uncomfortable. My cod sandwich. We also ran into some of my sister’s friends, who shared our uncomfortable picnic table with us. They had baked a loaf of banana bread, but I guess their kitchen was as poorly provisioned as ours because they didn’t have enough bananas for the recipe so they supplemented with plums and nectarines. The bread was described to us as “plummy nectarine-y banana bread,” and a discussion of how to spell “nectarine-y” ensued (my sister and brother-in-law are both newspaper editors). It was great. Later we gave them three nearly rotten bananas from our kitchen so they could make another loaf of banana bread, this time with just bananas and no plums or nectarines – though I can’t imagine that would represent an improvement. For dinner, we returned to Bob’s Sub & Cone. Please don’t tell Bob, but Bob’s Sub & Cone was not our first choice. First, we went to the Beachcomber restaurant, which as the name suggests is at the beach, but I assigned no credibility to the claim that our wait for a table would only be “25 to 35 minutes.” There were a zillion people there and the hostess who gave us the information didn’t seem to have a clue. So, we decided instead to go to Moby Dick’s out on Route 6, pretty near to PJ’s. Mind you, at each step of the expedition, my nephews were saying, “Why aren’t we going to Bob’s Sub & Cone? It’s the best restaurant,” and singing the Bob’s Sub & Cone song. When we saw the parking lot at Moby Dick’s, which was totally overpopulated, we drove right on by and headed down Route 6 to Bob’s Sub & Cone. The amazing thing is that the food at Bob’s Sub & Cone is just as good as at the other good places on Route 6, but because it’s a couple of miles farther out from Wellfleet it doesn’t get nearly as busy as Moby Dick’s, PJ’s, et al. We had virtually no wait (one family ahead of us on line at the ordering window) and were able to claim two picnic tables and a high chair. In addition to having all the same fried seafood stuff as all the other places on Route 6, Bob’s Sub & Cone has an extensive subs menu. I felt I should try one, since last night I’d had a cone – shouldn’t I have a sub tonight? So I got a sausage sub, and it was pretty damn good. Also excellent were the onion rings. The broiled cod sandwich was a surprise highlight – it’s not actually listed as such on the menu board but we got the 411 that it was available. Cape Cod has got to be the best place in the world for onion rings. I mean, maybe there’s one place somewhere that serves better onion rings, but surely there is no region that has more examples of excellent onion rings. At Bob’s Sub & Cone, you order cones (and other ice cream items) from the outside windows, but you order savory food from a counter indoors. Behind the counter, we noticed a pass-through to the kitchen, and a guy toiling at the stoves. “Is that Bob?” I asked the young lady at the cash register. “Yes, it is,” she replied. My nephews were very excited about this piece of information. I later mentioned to her that my nephews really worship Bob, and she said, “Oh, you better tell Bob.” So I yelled the information back to Bob in the kitchen and he kind of nodded. Luckily, I went to college in New England, so I understand about the whole “man of few words” New England non-speaking style (kind of like how Japanese people understand the subtleties of bowing) and can interpret these nods properly. I could tell Bob was pleased with the information. Because I made so many trips back to the counter to get trays, condiments, etc. (apparently nobody else in my family was available to help with these tasks), I had several opportunities to communicate with Bob. At one point, when the cashier was off doing something, I approached and Bob came out. “What’re you missing?” he asked. We needed a large lemonade, so he poured it and walked away. My nephew was particularly excited to learn that his lemonade had been poured by Bob’s own hand. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch it, and expressed regret that Bob hadn’t signed the cup or at least the lid. At the end of the meal, I saw Bob inside at a table talking to what must have been his family. He waved. We decided there was no way we were leaving without a photo of Bob. There was some question whether Bob would stand for it, but Bob totally exceeded our expectations and turned out to be a real ham. He even posed with PJ.

I wouldn't do it. It will probably just cause them to give you more free stuff, in an ever-increasing spiral of gifting. Probably the best thing you can do is send them more customers via word-of-mouth recommendations, though I imagine you already do a lot of this.

Right. It's just the meat of a steamed lobster, chopped into manageable chunks, served still hot, dressed with drawn butter on a New England-style split, buttered and griddled hot-dog bun. It's not really even the same genus as the lobster roles they serve in Maine, Mass., etc. I like both, but would always choose the Connecticut version.

There are a few things you can do. Begin by adjusting your expectations: you're not likely to have the meal of a lifetime under such circumstances, but you can still have a delicious and wonderful meal. Ask some questions on the phone about the ebb and flow of the dining room -- different restaurants peak at different times. See if you can slip in between the busy peaks. The most important interactions occur when you are seated and order, so if you can make those things happen at a less busy time, you won't suffer so much when the place gets crazy later on. Most importantly, you can pick restaurants that handle their busiest nights well. Some restaurants manage busy times a lot better than others. Over time you learn which places bring on the right number of staff, don't do heavy overbooking, have kitchens with enough capacity and talent to handle the rush, etc.

Impossible. Accept it graciously and leave a big tip.

Our maritime activity for this morning was a trip to the Wellfleet pier, where we walked with Momo and PJ and checked out some fishing boats that looked like they were right out of Perfect Storm, except that was somewhere else in MA and, curiously, not one of the guys on the fishing boats looked like Mark Wahlberg. Part of the plan for the pier expedition was to eat breakfast at Mac’s, at the outside seating area with the dog. Mac’s is sort of the centerpiece of the Wellfleet pier area, and serves breakfast, lunch, dinner and whatever you call the ice cream meal. Unfortunately, Mac’s turned out to be the only place of its kind I’ve ever seen with a “No Dogs Allowed” sign at the entrance to its outside seating area. We thought about getting carry-out and eating on a bench on the pier but ultimately said screw it. When we got back to the house after a detour to the beach for a run with the dog (well, I didn’t run), I made some eggs in my trusty 10” Calphalon Commercial Nonstick skillet. Moments after I finished the eggs, my sister’s family started waking up and my brother-in-law asked if I wanted to go with him and my nephews to the Lighthouse restaurant for breakfast. How could I refuse? The Lighthouse is to the Wellfleet downtown area as Mac’s is to the pier area. Not that the food is particularly good – it’s average-quality for a diner-type place – but the waitresses have attitude and tattoos and my brother-in-law impressed me greatly by pulling a bottle of real maple syrup out of his pocket for us to use instead of the synthesized crap the restaurant served. Yes, the Lighthouse has a fake lighthouse on its roof. We decided to spend the afternoon in Provincetown. Ellen and I took our two nephews, PJ and Momo alone – my sister and brother-in-law went to some flea market. Provincetown is the town at the end of the Cape. It’s a year-round community with a very substantial artsy population including a lot of very out gay residents and visitors. The main downtown street is a total scene. Compared to the other towns on the Cape, Provincetown is downright urban. Anyway, because we were managing so many people we didn’t do a lot of photography, nor did we eat at any good places. I’d wanted to go to Clem & Ursie’s raw bar – a Provincetown institution – but one of my nephews only eats pizza and his needs were paramount. So, we went to George’s Pizza, and I shared a pie with one nephew while my other nephew (who eats anything but pizza) had a “chicken McGeorge” sandwich, and Ellen, Momo and PJ sat in the park across the way. It was all fine. Afterwards we bought candy and cookies at some tourist-trap stores, took a photo of some colorful boats (sea kayaks, I guess) on the beach and checked out the tower, which is the main architectural feature of Provincetown (you can see it from miles away as you approach on the highway). This here is called Uncle Tim’s Bridge (we’re back in Wellfleet now). Uncle Tim’s Bridge is the true, right, official name of the bridge. There’s an official government sign right at the entrance to the bridge that says so. It’s not much of a bridge, but it does connect the main part of Wellfleet with a little island (Uncle Tim’s Island?) with a little hill in the middle (Mount Uncle Tim?) where we let the dogs run around and play. The place my sister rented is only a few hundred feet from the entrance to Uncle Tim’s Bridge, so my sister just calls it “Tim’s Bridge” – she feels that not only does the proximity justify this familiarity but also that the house she’s renting may actually be Uncle Tim’s house (I hasten to add that the latter claim has not been supported by any actual evidence or even a convincing argument). We had dinner at PJ’s – how could we not go to a restaurant called PJ’s when we have an actual kid named PJ. Not that they gave a crap when we told them his name was PJ. Anyway, the place is another of these large-menu, mostly seafood, order from the window joints. We got a bunch of fried stuff. I had a lobster roll, because my brother-in-law said the lobster rolls at PJ’s were good – and that turned out to be very true. I confess a preference for the Connecticut style of lobster roll, made with hot lobster and butter, but the upper New England style, made with cold lobster mixed with a little mayo (the less the better), is tasty too, and this was a good specimen. After we had eaten, my sister started going on about how great her tuna roll (tuna salad sandwich on the same split-and-buttered hot dog roll they use for a lobster roll) was, and said I should be sure to write about it in my foodblog. I observed that I hadn’t tasted it. My sister, who is an editor at the Wall Street Journal, understood the journalistic ethical quandary this situation presented, so she went and bought another tuna roll for me to taste. She also grabbed a grilled cheese sandwich because, she said, she got a good vibe from it. Well, I’ll be damned if the tuna roll wasn’t excellent. The hot buttered roll, the cool tuna with lots of mayo – it really worked. The grilled cheese was nice too – the cheese was thankfully white. In photographing the tuna roll, the whole family got bitten by the reality TV bug and collaborated during an impromptu food styling session, adding various utensils and condiments to the shot until it was magazine perfect. Here’s PJ eating a piece of the bagel he’s been working on for the past couple of days. Self explanatory. For dessert we went to Bob’s Sub & Cone. The establishment serves, among other things, subs and cones. Also assorted fried seafood and such. My nephews really worship this place. The older one actually has a Bob’s tee-shirt, and a CD with the Bob’s Sub & Cone song on it (which replaces the lyrics “Like a rolling stone” with “Bob’s Sub & Cone”). Here they are worshiping at the altar of Bob’s Sub & Cone. This is the place. PJ enjoyed a taste of ice cream, his second ever and first from a cone.

Yes, two containers of very good tartar sauce and two containers of mediocre coleslaw. The coleslaw containers were only slightly larger than the tartar sauce containers. We were laughing about it, because an order of onion rings at this place consists of like a million onion rings whereas an order of coleslaw (made from equally cheap ingredients) is totally parsimonious. We also took a tray full of little white paper cups of various condiments, like cocktail sauce, ketchup and vinegar (you can sort of see it in the picnic table photo).

Because they're all being eaten by good men? For their kind, these were superb onion rings. In general, though, I prefer an onion ring with a little more onion to it.

I'm sure somebody with longer Cape experience than I can trace the origins of the Christmas Tree Shops. They certainly sell Christmas stuff around Christmastime -- I proposed to Ellen on the Cape in February of, um, let me see, I guess it was 1993 because we were engaged for more than a year, and I had arranged a dinner at the Captain Linnell House in Orleans. We'd had a long day, though, and Ellen was like, "You know, I'm tired, let's just drive back to our place and skip dinner." There would have been no recovery, since we were staying maybe 45 minutes from Orleans. So I diverted her attention by suggesting we go to the Christmas Tree Shop in Orleans. Between 45 minutes there and showing up 30 minutes early for our reservation, I was able to make the dinner (and the proposal) happen. Cost me maybe $24 in dreck we didn't need -- well worth it. Oh, to get to the point, there was lots of Christmas stuff on super-clearance at that point. I'm pretty sure the Christmas Tree Shops are currently owned by Bed, Bath and Beyond, but who knows, maybe they got their start selling Christmas trees just like Microsoft got its start selling miniature stuffed animals before it became a computer software company.

The New York Times reported today that Tom Colicchio is leaving Gramercy Tavern. Danny Meyer has bought him out, ending their 12-year partnership.

If the lunch and dinner menus are completely different, the lunch test doesn't work. However, in my experience the good restaurant where lunch and dinner are that different is rare. The norm at fine-dining restaurants is for the lunch food to be either the same as dinner (but usually at a lower price), the same as dinner but a smaller selection and maybe with the addition of a couple of salad and light items, the same as dinner but smaller portions, or similar to dinner but with some luxury ingredients (truffles, foie gras) dropped from some of the dishes, or a combination of those approaches. So lunch is often a good, low-risk preview. Do I really think it's fair to judge a restaurant on lunch alone? From the standpoint of a journalist, no. From the standpoint of a consumer, yes. The restaurant represents itself with every meal it serves, every plate of food. As one critic said -- I think it was Jim Quin from Philadelphia, but I'll have to double check the source when I get home -- as long as restaurants charge by the meal, they should be judged by the meal.

Sometimes you can't salvage such an evening, no matter what you do. That's the reality of restaurant dining: on any given night, even the best restaurants in the world can perform poorly. And sometimes there's no redress -- for example even in the extreme instance of a comp and an invitation to return for another meal, that doesn't help you if you're only going to be in that town for one day this decade, or if it was your 25th wedding anniversary that got ruined. So, I have no 100% perfect solution. There are, however, two main things you can to do improve your chances. First, react and intervene early and at the highest level. Don't wait until halfway through a lame meal to speak up. At the first sign of trouble, take it up with the highest-ranking manager you can find. This is the most reliable (not perfect, but most reliable) way to see your meal experience turn around and recover from a bad start. Second, be open to a recovery. Some people get so mad after mistakes are made that they can't enjoy their meals even after the mistakes are corrected and apologies are made. That's not a recipe for a happy life. Allow the restaurant to fix the problem, and if the problem really is fixed well and with aplomb, let it go. Sometimes restaurants prove their greatness by how they recover from missteps. Be open to that.