markk
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Posts posted by markk
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I wonder why a restaurant would "deliberately" bring the wrong wine by the glass? What's in it for them?
I'll give you one example. There was a restaurant I used to go to year after year in Strasbourg (France). The people would change from year to year but the place was the same, and they always had a more than decent red Bordeaux by the glass, though it may have changed from year to year depending, but it was always similar in drinking. One year when it was served with my duck course, it wasn't a Bordeaux! So I told the waitress, and she said that it was. I said that it wasn't. She went to the bartender and came back and told me that it was. I protested, showed her the color at the very least, and told her it didn't taste or look like a Bordeaux and she said that it was, albeit a "light" one. Then they closed for a few days for Christmas. When I returned after the closing and ordered my meal, when I got to the meat/duck course I was about to order something when she sheepishly said to me, "that wasn't a Bordeaux after all the other night, you were right. The bartender didn't want to open a fresh bottle right before we were closing so he gave you an Alsace Pinot Noir that he had open because he thought that after so much white wine you wouldn't know the difference".
So that answers what's in it for them, restaurants, that is.
Over the years there, I had once been served a Pinot Blanc that wasn't (they were embarrased when I caught it), and years later (the year of the Bordeaux incident above) I ordered a Pinot Gris with one particular course, and what was in the glass was clearly a dry Gewurztraminer. I made a large, dramatic, but very good natured stink about how often they do this, because though I was tipsy, I was on very sure ground because of what a Gewurztraminer tastes like, even a dry one. When the manager came over, he had only to smell the glass before he apologized profusely and went to chew people out.
But a restaurant not wanting to open a new bottle for a glass if it's right before closing, or a restaurant being out of a wine and making an unannounced substitution because it's quicker and easier, or perhaps a restaurant deciding to substitute a cheaper wine for a customer they don't think will know the difference - these are all possible answers to what's in it for them.
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I have had several experiences where I was presented with a glass already filled and the wine was not what was ordered (a couple of times I believe that it was not accidental). Any more, I demand to see the glass poured.
If you can tell that the wine served wasn't the one ordered, why do you need to see it poured from the bottle? I should explain - I don't mean this as a nasty or sarcastic comment one bit. I'm curious though. Before I say why I'm curious, I'm hoping you'll answer.
This happens to me a lot with varietals; I get brought a glass of a different grape than I ordered (even in France where we're not ordering by the grape). Sometimes it can be a legitmate mistake, and other times it's deliberate (I know this because people have confessed). So I'm wonderng why you say that.
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Let me start by saying that I know that it's my own fault for watching a Rachel Ray program! I saw that an episode of $40 A Day was featuring a few places in Miami that I'm interested in, so I taped and watched it, though I don't know how recent the episode may be. Still...
She announces that she's craving Stone Crabs, and goes to Captain Jim's Seafood for them.
She has a brief conversation with the owner about how the fish in the case was caught by their own boats the night before, and then the camera slowly shows everything in the case, during which she gives a narration, which was clearly done in post-production, because there's background music instead of the ambient noise from the restaurant. As the camera pans all the different fish, she identifies them correctly - until the very end, that is. The camera shot starts on a grouper, and as it shows each different fish, she says, "I see grouper, snapper, oysters, yellow tail, sea bass, cracked conch..." and then they finish on a bushel of live, and very lively blue crabs, and she says, "... and my favorite, stone crabs!"
Of course, if they were stone crabs, not only would they look totally different, they wouldn't have them whole (!!) and they wouldn't have them alive (!!!), because only the claws are harvested, and cooked, at sea. And by the way, when they panned the seafood case, there were cooked stone crab claws next to the cracked conch.
They recommend the crabs garlic-style, and they take her in back and let her pick her own, from a bucket of very feisty live blue crabs. Then they steam them, and toss them with garlic butter. They're very large specimens by the way, and probably have a nice amount of jumbo lump and backfin meat. She breaks off a tiny pincher (claw), with perhaps a fraction of an ounce of meat, certainly the least desirable part of the blue crab, and thinks she's in heaven.
Does she not know the difference between Blue Crabs and Stone Crab Claws? Does nobody at the Food Newtork?
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Why is that the first restaurants to go into expanding suburban areas... are all chains?
Is it something as simple as the fact that almost by definition, suburban restaurants are almost all "new construction"? Expanding suburban areas don't have existing downtown areas with storefronts for rent. Most anything in the suburbs would be new construction, whether it's a free-standing restaurant, or part of a mall, no?
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I just can't believe how individuals can make such a simple thing so complicated. Just season, brown in hot oven and then roast at 350F until internal temp is 100F. Let rest for at least one hour for full rib roast. Works EVERY TIME!-Dick
Well, that's lovely to say, but do you get an end-cut that looks like this...
or like this...?
...both being roasts I cooked, but the second being one whose end-cut I was not satisfied with.
Or do you just not care about the crispiness of the end-cut?
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If you're willing to venture a few minutes north on Rt. 17, and you like classic French food, especially "Pot au Feu", there's a fabulous place that does a quick, hand-held version of a boiled beef with onions, in which the beef is ground (for easier eating on-the-go) and it's served on a moist bun that's pre-garnished with a bit of gherkin. It's on the southbound side of 17 in Hasbrouck Heights, and they have in-car service options. The portions are small but very reasonably priced and they have quantity pricing available.
what is name of the restaurant?
The name is Chateau Blanc, and the address is 37 Route 17 (Southbound). It's just across from where Industrial Ave. intersects the northbound lanes of 17. It's about 325 ft. north of the Houlihan's which is also on the South side of 17. It's all just a bit south of the intersection with Route 46.
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If you're willing to venture a few minutes north on Rt. 17, and you like classic French food, especially "Pot au Feu", there's a fabulous place that does a quick, hand-held version of a boiled beef with onions, in which the beef is ground (for easier eating on-the-go) and it's served on a moist bun that's pre-garnished with a bit of gherkin. It's on the southbound side of 17 in Hasbrouck Heights, and they have in-car service options. The portions are small but very reasonably priced and they have quantity pricing available.
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A very elaborate bagel place with (not only great bagels) a gigantic sandwich selection, hot and cold, and a lots more.
Decent Pizza place in the Shopping center in town. Also a bagel place. -
China Chef, which is on Patterson Plank Road in "downtown" Secaucus (a few hundred feet from Rt. 3 E) does an excellent dim sum on weekends with carts, but on weekdays they have about 75% of those items available, which they cook from frozen to order. Does that qualify as lunch for you? (I've never had anything but dim sum there.)
On the other side of Rt. 3 you have a Bonefish Grill, but I don't know if they serve lunch, or if that'd be up to your standards anyway. There's also a place called "LA Estrella Del Caribe" right there on Rt. 3 E, but I've never been. And there's a "Harold's Deli" (no connection in years to the original) in the Quality Inn by the intersection with Rt. 17, but every time I've been it's been horrible.
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Yes, crabmeat stuffed Lobster is always a favorite. A year or two ago we were craving it and I posted for suggestions, and then we tried a few places in the Ironbound with disappointing results, though I know Segovia, and haven't been there in many years. Thanks for that.
Also, the description of the stuffed Lobster at JP's sounded really good.
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I thought everybody might enjoy this article about "supertasters" from "Prevention" magazine.
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Yes, Freiburg in the SW, east of Colmar, France. I just did the search again, and came up with 30 Bib Gourmand restaurants, 20 of which are less than 21 km. If you pm me your e-mail address, I'll be happy to send you the pdf of the results.
And there are three 1-star places within 18 km. Colombi is one of them, and from the Michelin details I went to their website, and the menu looks fabulous !! That works for me!
I assume you mean Freiburg in SW Germany?I can only see three "Bib Gourmand" restaurants, all of them quite deserving of the honour.
The best hotel *and* the best restaurant is the Colombi. Nothing else comes close.
(I travel to Freiburg regularly. I have friends there and once lived there for three years.)
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Thanks. I hadn't thought of City Island (and I haven't been there in, well, 40 years!). It seemed too early to call restaurants this morning when I read your message, so I did some googling, and at least found this about JP's, but I'll keep at it: "And even though the mammoth crab cake was packed with breadcrumbs and fake crab meat, the flavor was pretty good."
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Who keeps filling up the stupid candy bowl?!
Why, grandma and grandpa do. When grandpa isn't planting vegetables (which he farms without pesticides or chemicals) or making his own wine, he's out chasing the sales on the cheapest jumbo bags of candy at the CVS.
As K8memphis so touchingly pointed out, "Yeah, the sugar's not any good for the kids but it is a symbol of I want you to have more than I had." Since they don't know, and can't imagine that it's bad for them in such quantities, I'm sure that's what they're thinking.
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Out of curiosity, I went to the Michelin site. If you go there (www.viamichelin.com) and use the "site map" to find the "restaurants" page, and put in Freiburg, you can check for restaurants with stars or the Bib Gourmand (great meals- and I can attest to this, and reasonable, not astronomical prices), and you'll find that Freiburg has thirty (30) Bib Gourmand restaurants. Yikes !!! Some of them are in the suburbs, but still, Yikes! I've never seen that many in my life.
Edited for grammer.
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Okay, so the objection here is to quantity. Reasonable people can agree that it's okay to give some candy to kids. Even my pediatrician, who strenuously advocates organic milk and eggs, is fine with candy as a treat and a reward.
Then the question becomes the acceptable quantity. It sounds like these caregivers are off the charts. Still, I wouldn't necessarily call this abuse -- indeed, I think it's a bizarre sign of the times that anybody would imply that it's abusive to give candy to children. The whole diabetes epidemic issue, while often repeated as fact, is very much still under review, and hardly justifies withholding sugar from all children.
Right. I never called it abuse. Or neglect. What I said was that I found it upsetting.
I'll always remember being in a small store where a young kid was so wound up, he was jumping up and down and twirling in circles. The mother looked down at him and scolded, "If you don't stop that, no more soda for you!"
There's one level on which I sometimes feel that if kids don't crave sugar, and don't ask for it, it's kind of silly to give it to them. I mean, if they like it and it works as a reward, and they don't find the bags of it and o.d. on it when you're not looking and don't become sugar junkies, there's no harm. But if a kid doesn't crave it, why indclude it in his diet?
I had a friend who fed her son as many Dunkin Donuts as he cared to eat for breakfast, and I also always thought this was a strange way to start the day.
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The grandparents grew up in remote, isolated villages, and mostly ate what they grew and caught, and I was under the impression, possibly entirely incorrectly (I'm happy to admit that) that refined sugar in those cases may have been a luxury, though they obviously had honey from somewhere. I'm not an expert in any of that stuff. These people still live close to the land (and need to feel that they do) and grow a lot of what they eat, and make their own wine, and yet they will use processed foods in a way that makes no sense if you hear their reasons for eating the way they do, and which would probably scare the daylights out of them if they could read the ingredients labels and knew what those things were. But cheap candy and soda somehow are fine. Maybe sugar was a luxury to them, and now that they live somewhere that it's ubiquitous, they use it as much as they can, even.
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It's way closer to thirty than it is to three (and it is gallons of Coke and Sprite all day and with meals). If it were just three, even I wouldn't object. It is sad that they watch so much tv, especially at the cost of people engaging them in activities and reading to them (I used to stop by regularly and do that), but that's the way it is. In one sense, since nobody caring for them all day every day speaks English, it's their only exposure to the language, though.
And Lonnie, I can tell you that the subject is closed. It's not Spanish, but it wouldn't matter if somebody of great authority told it to them in their native language. These are old-fashioned, stubborn people, suspicious of any new-fangled discoveries that tell them their old ways may be wrong. "I eat sugar (substitute: do this, eat that) when I am younger, and look, I turn out great!", accompanied by a fist thumping on the chest, is always the response.
I have a lot of dents in my head (and a dented wall) from this.
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Are you saying it is due to ignorance? Maybe you could help them out Mark.
It's due to ingorance, generation gaps, a severe language barrier, and with them having grown up with sweets (possibly not the refined sugar we have today, though this would not be able to be explained to them and would be deemed irrelevant anyway) there's no absolutely no means, or hope of communication, trust me on this. Their kids, the parents of the kids getting horse-fed the sugar, will absolutely, positively not criticize their parents, nor will they tolerate any criticism of them (that was made perfectly clear to me), so that's really that, btw.
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We're craving baked stuffed shrimp with crabmeat (aka shrimp with crabmeat stuffing, but baked or broiled, not fried). Does anybody know anyplace in New York (or Northern NJ) that serves it and is good? I'm hoping that someplace may have re-instated it in a nostalgia nod. In NJ we have a lot of diners that have always had the dish, but that imitation surimi "crabmeat" has taken over everywhere.
Thanks for your suggestions.
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Why are those kids spending "hours" zoning out in front of screens, anyway? Why aren't they up and doing stuff with their hands and/or their imaginations? Ohhh... don't get me going!
Trying to stay within eG guidelines: quick answer, very sadly that's not within the grandparents generation's possibilities, horrible (and OT) as it is. But I thought the sugar part was relevant to eG and am hoping that sugar detractors and supporters will weigh in on this.
Are you asking for people who support the use of refined sugar to weigh in on the issue of neglect? I don't think the sugar issue can be isolated from the behaviour you are describing.
Wiser minds, I am sure, will weigh in on the topicality.
Well, I was trying to be fair, and generous (very unusual for me, for sure
); there are many food cultures around the world who drink incredibly sugar-sweetened coffee to start the day, and with astoundingly sweet, gooey, sugary desserts, and they're from one of them, so I don't think they are thinking of it as neglect, and I'm positive that they don't have any idea of the current thinking (amoung us anti-sugars) about its cons. I wondered if any sugar lovers would say that they're not against eating really sugary things such as really sweet desserts, but that they thought that this behavior with kids was wrong for any reason. And I wondered if other people maybe thought I was nuts on this one. -
Why are those kids spending "hours" zoning out in front of screens, anyway? Why aren't they up and doing stuff with their hands and/or their imaginations? Ohhh... don't get me going!
Trying to stay within eG guidelines: quick answer, very sadly that's not within the grandparents generation's possibilities, horrible (and OT) as it is. But I thought the sugar part was relevant to eG and am hoping that sugar detractors and supporters will weigh in on this.
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Refined sugar has played a part in a number of threads recently. I have a story to share and question to ask that I don’t think belongs in any of those threads.
I know some people who care for their grandchildren (and some great-nephews and nieces) during the day while the parents work - it's like communal babysitting, in that the other grandparents come over to socialize while they all care for the kids, ages 3 - 10 more or less.
At some point, the kids stop running around, and lump out in front of the tv to watch their shows, or videotapes, and occupy themselves quietly for several hours.
The grandparents always have a gigantic bowl of what I consider to be 'crappy' candy - mini Chunky bars, Hershey's Kisses, etc. on the hallway table. Somebody goes and checks on the kids approximately every 20 minutes, which is good. But on the way, they pass the candy bowl, and take out candies, unwrap them, and then without distracting the kids, who are absorbed in their show, put them in their mouths just like you'd feed a sugar cube to a horse.
This always upsets me. Why would you do that to kids?? (One of the kids has since developed a serious sugar addiction with many bad consequences, as in he'll sneak away at home, eat a large bag or two of candy, and get sick on a daily basis.) I mean, it's not even as if the kids were asking you for candy! I'm wondering what folks think about this - not just those of you who are against refined sugar, but those of you who are in favor of it as well.
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Which restaurants do you like in Orlando?
I've posted about them on this thread here and on the other related thread, here.
I'm usually there for two weeks at a time, and I usually give up after the first week. As I posted on one of the Chain Restaurant threads, I've been to the (Lord Help Me) Bonefish Grill twice. The first time I was grossed-out by all those goopy, unctuous, cloying sauces that repeat in all he dishes, so the next time, hoping for some plain, well grilled fish, we returned and asked them to leave the lemon-concoction sauce out of the steamed mussels, and got a bowl of delicious mussels with just white wine and garlic, and then an extrememly nice grilled piece of swordfish, that with a squeeze of lemon and some salt, really hit the spot. But aside from the places I've mentioned in the other posts, like Coq au Vin (though I don't know how it is or if anything has changed this year), and Texas de Brazil and Charley's/Vitos, I usually run out of places to eat.
Wine by the glass service in restaurants
in Restaurant Life
Posted
Huh? If they've refilled an empty bottle with any old wine, how does displaying the bottle prevent mistakes? That they might pour the wrong fake wine? I think the only guarantee of the right wine is a sealed bottle opened in front of the customer, which of course you can't do each time a glass in needed. And as far as a place wilfully filling empty bottles of more expensive wine with cheaper wine, that's quite a commitment to fraud on their part - I think (do I mean hope?) that substitutions would happen on a less regular basis, and for reasons that I gave earlier. Of course, if the substituted wine is the same alcoholic strength as the bottle's label, they're not in "Liquor License" danger.
But...
It's just a question of how honest and ethical the restaurant is and what their commitment to their customers is. If I trust that you're not going to try to substitute cheaper or different wine than I ordered, and that you're going to take some care when you grab the bottle to get the correct one, then I certainly don't care if you just carry filled glasses to the table.