mamster

What, no 727 Pine? My first choice starting from the Elliott would be Zaina, on third between Pine and Stewart. It's a middle eastern sandwich shop, and a really good one. You know how at most places when you get a falafel sandwich it comes with falafel, lettuce, tomato, and tahini? Well, here you get falafel, fava beans, hummus, lettuce and tomato, hot sauce, tahini, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. And all of it is good. They grill the pita for you and hand-wrap it. It's a total mess, so don't walk anywhere with it. Other than that, I don't really know of anything worthwhile in that Pike-Pine desert. Does anyone else?

Thanks for the wonderful post, klink--you ate all kinds of thing that I've never tried, and now I want to. Please let us know how you like Tojo's. See you on Monday, right?

When we made it, the middle pieces didn't work so well. Maybe with some more time they would have become tender. Laurie and I agree that next time we'll probably just knock florets off.

Hey, Nancy reviews Todai today (c'mon, say it with me). Check it out here.

Hey, the most popular thing at King Food was also chicken and fries. Every time I actually went in and ordered at the counter, there were kids in there eating fried chicken with fries.

Sigh. Responding to this feels kind of like figuring out what to say to someone when a loved on has died. It brought to mind something Jane Jacobs said (I couldn't find the exact quote) about how in the long run, our happiness depends more on our acquaintances than our friends. It has a heartless ring to it, but also a brutal emotional truth that gets brought home to me again and again. Or, hey, if the thread is about bad Chinese food: I used to work at a fiscally unsound Internet startup on the north edge of the meatpacking district, just as the meatpacking district was starting to become cool (I was on the cusp, man). I shared a big office with one coworker. At least four times a week we would order from the tiny bad Chinese place a block away on 14th street. We would always get either the "hunan chicken" or "hunan beef": meat stir-fried with a mess of vegetables, drenched in a spicy garlic sauce, served with steamed rice and a free can of Coke. The total, with delivery tip, was Ů each (and this was a sizable tip). There was a fair amount of office politics going on at all times, and we were partially insulated from it by being a floor apart. Some days it felt like it was me, my coworker, and the King Food delivery guy versus the world. Once one of the upstairs employees came down and said, "How can you guys eat that greasy #### all the time?" He did not get it. Sometimes I would pass the delivery guy hitching up his bicycle as I walked to the train on my way home and he would always laugh and wave. I guess this isn't really a story in the same sense that Shaw's is: eventually I quit my job and never went back to King Food. It's probably still there. But yeah, these places are important. Come to think of it, I could tell almost the same story about a different hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant the first time I lived in New York. I'll spare you.

Today I had a bowl of Campbell's Chunky Sirloin Burger soup for lunch. I'll bet someone else here likes this stuff. I grew up on it, and I'm coming off a flu and knew it would be the perfectly comforting thing to hasten my recovery.

Yeah, here on Pacific Northwest, we're experts on Stamford. KHAN'S MONGOLIAN GARDEN 135 BEDFORD ST STAMFORD CT (203) 975-0209 ฟ all-you-can-eat You can call and see if they still exist at that number. Hey, did anyone else watch that terrible reality show Lost? We watched the first ep before leaving for Asia. The premise was that they drop the contestants in some remote corner of the globe and give them like 贄 and they have to get back to New York. The first order of business was to figure out where they'd been dropped. Well, the contestants were dropped in rural Mongolia. And all of them figured this out pretty quickly except for this one team that was totally convinced that they were in Czechoslovakia. It must have been the by-the-ounce barbecue pricing that led them astray. Out of my yurt, Matthew

No, at the Chang's locations I've been to, they have rather sorry manufactured spring roll or mu shu wrappers. Now I have the image of Chang's being overrun by an actual Mongol horde driven to a warlike frenzy after being charged by the ounce for their barbecue.

Jim, how dare you. I lived right on the Portland-Beaverton border for seven years and...well, okay, everything you said about Beaverton is true.

Boy do I have fond memories of Chang's Mongolian Grill. We used to go to the Tanasbourne Mall location and sometimes the downtown. The first time I ever skipped a class was when a friend of mine was moving away freshman year of high school, and I took him out to lunch at the Mongolian Grill. There's a Chang's on my street in Seattle, and I've been a couple times, but it's either not as good or my memory is inflated. The lines seem longer, too.

I've had dinner with Michael Hood and he's a very nice guy. I agree with his stance on bad Chinese food. On the other hand, I thought this was a weird way to lead off a review of a Chinese restaurant that he really liked. Maybe he wrote this catchy lede a while ago and was waiting to stick it on something--I've certainly done that. Seattle is small enough that all of the local reviewers know each other and have something of a mutual admiration society. So my incisive comments end here. Maybe we could broaden this. What do the rest of you think of Michael Hood's reviews, and who's your favorite local reviewer? (If it's not me, I can live with that.)

For years we used a Mr. Dudley of the classic "would you like fresh ground pepper on that, ma'am" style. It was okay, but it choked on big tellicherry peppercorns and didn't hold its grind adjustment very well. So last year I replaced it with a Unicorn Magnum, which addressed all my complaints. It's got a great mechanism. Wide circle, which means a fast grind and pretty much impossible to jam. The grind adjustment is on the bottom, so you don't lose your grind setting when you refill. Refilling is incredibly simple--you fill it on the side, and it holds a lot. And it comes with a little plastic base so you don't get pepper on your shelf. Downsides: it's acrylic, and I'm afraid I'm going to melt it someday. On the other hand, I never left Mr. Dudley on the stove over the course of six years. And no snooty waiter would be caught dead carrying this thing--it basically looks like a stubby black cylinder. I have no idea how the Unicorn will hold up over time, but I've enjoyed using it in the kitchen so far and it feels pretty solid. It's ำ I'm not sure about the warranty. There's also a bigger version (the Magnum Plus) with the same mechanism for โ unless you use an enormous amount of pepper, I don't see the point of the big one. Cook's Illustrated recommended this mill twice in a row, but that's not why I got it. I got it because I used to work in a kitchen store where we sold literally dozens of different pepper mills from the traditional to the stupid, and this was the one that felt best in my hand. I sold scores of them and never saw one come back. Of course, maybe they were afraid to return them to me because I had the key to the knife case.

Tommy, I want a t-shirt that says "crunchy is a matter of personal preference," just so people will ask me what it means and I can be noncommittal.

Laurie has piped up for Garbonzo's, the local falafel chain, though she notes that it is neither a dive nor a diner. See another thread for a taqueria on Burnside that Jim Dixon and I like. Is the Hot Cake House on Powell still there? It's a totally greasy dive that got me through high school.

That is great advice, klink--I've been making the soy-wasabi sauce and fumbling with chopsticks even when faced with less-than-cohesive rice. I'm going to go omakase at Shiki one of these days and let you know how it went.

Hope nobody minds, but I'm going to move this thread to cooking. I don't want the general public to miss out on all our recipes. (Edited by mamster at 10:23 am on Feb. 4, 2002)

I don't feel like diving fully into this conversation, although I'm much enjoying all the considered opinions, but there's one pet peeve I'd like to home in on. The fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US does not in itself mean that Americans eat an unhealthy diet. The leading cause of death in Japan, by far, is cancer. This doesn't mean that the Japanese live a cancer-prone lifestyle and are unaware of the dangers of carcinogens. Cancer and heart disease are diseases of the elderly. It's very sad when a young person dies of one of these diseases, and it's especially sad because it's so very rare. Eventually, everybody dies of something. A quick measure of the overall health of a country is to ask not just how long people live but what they are dying from. If the answer is "cancer and heart disease," this suggests a healthy nation, not an unhealthy one, a nation that has largely triumphed over infectious disease. In 1940 the leading cause of death in Japan, again by a wide margin, was tuberculosis (I'm using Japan because I found a handy graph). That was a period of serious ill health. The cancer rate at the time was very low and has been rising steadily. Why has it been rising? For the same reason it's been rising everywhere else in the industrialized world: the population is aging. They are dying of cancer (and heart disease) because they are not dying of tuberculosis, pneumonia, the flu, and cholera. Sure, Americans should eat better and get more exercise, but that won't cure cancer or heart attacks. Arguing that people get cancer or heart disease due to a single cause not only shoves modern epidemiology under the rug, but it tries to twist an achievement into a mistake.

Ah, Kusina Filipina. I'm quite fond of the place, but I don't exactly associate it with vegetables, seeing as how they serve ten different pork stews, plus beef stew.

Which steam table place, heyjude? The possibilities that come to mind are Kanadala Paradiso, China Village, and Whole Foods. They do have a good broccoli with garlic sauce at CV. As far as Ambrosia, I don't think I could shelve my prejudices well enough to really enjoy a vegan restaurant. At some point during the meal I'd be prone to start ranting about how this would have been really good with a little bacon and this with butter and so on, and so I'd be truly missing the point. I have a feeling I'd also be overly cognizant of how cheap the ingredients are compared to what they're charging me. I guess I'd be willing to try it as an anthropological venture. I think it was James Peterson who said, "I don't like my meat without vegetables or my vegetables without meat."

I've been to Cafe Flora once, but it was a long time ago, way before my food writing days, and I don't really remember much about it. I'd definitely be willing to bury my skepticism of vegetarian restaurants for a day and give it another try. I drink a lot of herbal tea, so that infusion sounds nice.

Hey, put me on this bandwagon, too. We tried the roasted cauliflower the other night and it's as good as everyone says. To move this back toward my original post, is there any restaurant in the Northwest that serves vegetables as good as that cauliflower?

I did some extremely unscientific poking around on the web and found this: So I guess I was wrong about country style being cut from the shoulder, and it's probably a matter of semantics whether you want to call the bit just south of the shoulder "ribs" or not. I don't care about KBCS barbecure rules, so "country-style ribs" works for me.

It looks like top ten turned into top five, and since dinner will be ready soon, I'll go with five. This will probably change tomorrow: 1. Cucina Simpatica 2. Hot Sour Salty Sweet 3. The Italian Country Table 4. Complete set of Cook's Illustrated (cheating, probably) 5. Serious Pig These are the ones that come off the shelf more than any others.

There was a big salt taste-test article by Steingarten in Vogue a couple of months ago. It's not online, though, and I don't remember which issue it was. Probably December. I believe he ended up concluding, as Shaw mentioned, that the differences were subtle at best, and probably statistically insignificant, except that his favorite (Japanese blue salt or something) finished a clear last. He ended up sticking with Diamond Crystal. As do I. It feels good between my fingers.