Tess

rich, if I were you I would try to find one in a store and cancel the Amazon order. Maybe check with them first to see about the date. There shouldn't be so much of a problem. Mine just came from Amazon.

I finally caught the show last night, and I thought it was the most appetizing so far, especially the parts about Bobolink and the Korean place.

True confessions: when I went to school in Rome, I had gelato or granita-- and that's it-- for lunch almost every day. It was great! I don't think I'd do that again, though.

You're making me Romesick! Oh, those places by the Pantheon. I used to get granita at Tazza d'Oro a couple of times a week.

I think if I were a restaurateur I would want to make every effort to replace an unsatisfactory dish rather than comp it. Comping seems like a last resort and an admission of failure. And I wouldn't know what to do with customers who finish a dish and then complain about it. I've been out with people who do that and I find it embarrassing-- what do they expect can be done at that point? Maybe I'm just jaded, but I feel as if there's a small but significant subset of people who are looking for freebies in any situation. Someone spills a drink on you on a plane: call the airline and get a free ticket or an upgrade. That approach pays off, too, if you have the nerve to do it. I worked with a woman who spent her entire day at her desk calling all the businesses she dealt with to complain and try to get free stuff out them. Most of the time, they did give her what she wanted, probably just to shut her up.

Some people use margarita mix; I don't and I don't add sugar. (Not to sound snotty, but you might want to take another look at my post.)

I marinate chicken pieces in margaritas. There are a lot of recipes out there that call for putting them in margarita mix-- admittedly the sugar in those will make a nice glaze-- but I just use tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur. Also, a spice mix from Spice House called Mexican mix or fajita mix or something, and pepper. Do not let the chicken sit all night in citrus mixture however; if you are marinating a long time, add lime juice just the last couple hours.

I like to go to a bar with a big-screen TV sometimes to watch a game. I may eat there, but not food you have to pay much attention to. Who does these families' laundry anyway? All I can think is they must get a lot of food on themselves while staring at the screen and absent-mindedly conveying forkfulls to their mouths. Also, I can't help thinking this practice will lead to overweight. One of the first things they tell you in most diet programs is not to eat while doing something else so that you can be aware of what you're consuming. I find the ubiquity of video screens very annoying. The latest thing in one of our chain supermarkets is to have TVs playing infomercials at each checkout. It's obnoxious. Even worse, to my mind, our public library plays some kind of closed-circuit TV that you can't avoid watching as you stand in line to get books. It's information that's potentially of interest to library-goers but I don't think they should shove it in your face that way; it adds to the video overload we're all experiencing.

It's bribery if you go back to the same places a lot. I give out either tips or gifts at holiday time to anyone who performs a personal service for me, including the guys who look after my dog in the kennel. That's bribery and that's fine with me. I want them to remember me-- and not as someone who's a pain in the a**-- if I ever have to make a special request. I can also do that by acting polite and not habitually wasting their time, but a bit of money helps too. I like that part about tipping but in most cases I'm tipping those people on top of a wage I assume they can live on.

That's what I don't like about their catalog and why I'm not interested in their magazine. I don't need people telling me how important it is to have kids, or follow any other lifestyle for that matter. Admittedly, a lot of magazines have this problem. I don't subscribe to any of them.

Great Op-Ed piece! I think this part is really crucial: I think working for benefits does seem really unattractive when you're in your 20s-early 30s and as long as you're relatively healthy. When I first started working, I couldn't believe how tiny my take-home pay seemed once you took out insurance and TIAA-CREF. It seemed like kind of a paternalistic thing: they were protecting me from myself. Maybe it still is, in fact. And don't get me started on Social Security. Still, having a job with no benefits puts you in a very bad position as time goes on and I think servers ought to have at least the option of affordable insurance and retirement plans-- not the bogus ones where employers say they offer them but if you want them you have to pay through the nose.

I completely agree that that's the way to. I'm also enough of a freak about being in control of my time that I really don't get lunch at sit-down places if I have something right after; I'm too worried about getting out on time.

All points taken, except I don't understand, if you have sent food back to the kitchen and it's sitting there-- and clearly nothing it being done about it-- why you would have to pay for it. I do feel like you should explain but I don't see that you owe them money for it. Oh, and I think all bets are off if you've sent back for no good reason. But if they have agreed to take it back and fix it, and then they flake out, they really haven't delivered you anything.

I have never walked out without paying. I like to think in that situation that I would speak with someone before leaving, but I suppose it could happen that it was lunch hour and I didn't have time. (Discussion about stuff like that can get kind of long.) In that case, I would telephone later. I wouldn't feel I had to pay for food I'd sent back and which had not been returned to me, especially if it looked like no one cared. If food was till on the table that was inedible, I would carry it to someone myself and explain. I would still probably leave five bucks or something if I thought any honest effort had been made.

I don't care for the stuff myself, but I think they've pretty much nailed it, especially the business about it substituting for mayonnaise. The texture of commercial mayonnaise in the US *is* weird and it has an obnoxious metallic flavor. That's why Americans can't believe that Europeans put mayonnaise on frites.

Oberweis, which made the list, is OK. It is super-rich, which I think works well for some flavors and less well for others. For ice cream that rich, I prefer Haagen-Dasz.

Adam, when you get the new stuff, I would love to see what you do with it, although your blog will be over. I used to get a lot of upland game birds (mostly grouse and woodcock but some pheasant and ptarmigan) and found cooking them very interesting. (I'll also do a search on some of those birds.)

Is it the opening of grouse shooting season? I seem to recall that some shooting seasons start over there about now.

I shouldn't accuse that KFC of lax cleanliness standards. As I recall (it's been a long time), effort were made to keep the place clean. The sheer amount of frying that went on made it kind of inevitable that there would be grease in the air, I think.

I worked at a KFC one summer in high school. I found it really unpleasant because the whole place was greasy, and I was all but vegetarian, so it grossed me out. But it wasn't a hard job. My other food-service job was in college, in a deli with lots of health foods. Much more my kind of thing, and the free food was appreciated, but it was hard because I had to make sandwiches and wait on people at the same time. The place was not set up very efficiently. Also, I seemed to get a certain number of really impossible customers, which I either didn't get at KFC or didn't notice because the setup was more straightforward.

The shark dish was a lot like lutefisk, no? I think the show is fun, if a little slow. (That wacky tourism film was a bit much.)

People sometimes get upset if you speak to their children directly like that, but I don't see why. Kids are human beings; why should you not talk to them? I was recently in a nice restaurant near a couple with three young boys. The boys were obviously a little keyed up but they behaved well on the whole, and one of the things I noticed was that the host and waiters kept coming over and talking to the kids. By contrast, we recently ate most of a meal while watched over by a little kid standing next to our table grabbing his crotch. It was a large family group and the parents had decided to give the little kids their own table, with apparently no adult sitting there. The kids were not screaming or anything, but I thought it was kind of scary.

We went into one place with a fairly typical Midwestern menu. One of our party asked, "How's the catfish?" The server shook her head like, "You don't want to go there."

Is that Vosges? It is good.

I just watched that. Still available, and very much worth seeking out. (In my On Demand system, it's under the Discovery channel.) I'll be seeing the French episode for the first time tonight and am really looking forward to it.