jordyn

Okay, I'm thinking of visiting a friend in Durham during the first weekend in October. Where should I eat that's expensive? Magnolia Grill seems the obvious place. Is it the best? Where should I eat that's cheap? In particular, what are options like on a Sunday evening? (Note: Chapel Hill and Raleigh would probably be fine places to eat as well.)

For a business newspaper, the "cost of each dish" employs some awfully weak financial analysis. If you don't have any olive oil, and you buy it to make a dish, the full cost of the bottle is applied to the dish. This makes sense if you cook so rarely that your olive oil is going to spoil before you go to use it again, but generally it would seem reasonable to amortize the cost across a fairly large number of meals. I think that the article is correct in pointing out that it's easily possible to spend a ridiculously large amount of money cooking, especially as you start out and if you are afflicted by gadget envy.

This is where the Zagat website comes in handy since they have an "Open Sunday" criteria that you can use to search with.

I've never been there, but it's quite far from the City to be considered a "Toronto Area" restaurant. Susur is quite good.

I'd much rather not be able to get a reservation at the French Laundry than succeed in getting one from a place with such a bizarre and draconian cancellation policy.

I ran across an article in Wired News which indicates that Aureole has placed its wine list onto an electronic e-book. This gadget allows customers to search for wine based on a variety of factors, suggests pairings, and contains descriptions of each of the many wines. This seems like an incredibly useful tool, especially for people (like me) who know comparatively little about wine.

I'll be dining at Redwood Park and Charles Nob Hill this weekend, so I should be able to provide notes next week if that is not too late to be useful for you.

i don't think so, which was my point. clearly we have different views of the world. you know that i know that i'm not saying that. Hopefully this will be my last post on this subject, because we're now completely off the main topic. However, if you acknowledge that people take price into account when they decide where to eat, most restaurants would be stupid not to exploit an advantage that allows them to keep their menu costs down versus the competition. This would most likely manifest itself quite slowly over time, and some of the efficiencies gained would be converted into increase profits as well, but generally you're going to see places with lower costs charge less money. The exception, of course, is the rare restaurant that is booked close to 100% nearly all the time, or those that simply do not appeal to anyone even vaguely cost conscious. These restaurants probably see no noticable benefit from keeping prices down, in the short term at least.

Southern Girl: New Dining and New Age hopefully don't have that much in common, as I am a fan of the former but not the latter. Robert Brown spawned the term in this recent thread.

I am a fan of what has been termed elsewhere on this site as "the New Dining". Most of my best meals have come from putting myself in a chef's hands, which I largely attribute to them being quite a bit smarter about food than me. However, I don't think I would like the Herbfarm very much. It seems like the New Dining run amok. Specifically: 1) As others have commented, the "show" seems both silly and annoying. If there is a serious desire to make sure the diners are familiar with each and every member of the staff, staggering introductions throughout the course of the meal would at least make the show less annoying. Still silly, though. 2) Creating wine pairings is commendable and desirable. Requiring people to buy these pairings is questionable, especially when the alternative offered is clearly of lesser value. 3) Forcing pairings for an entire evening's meal with a single vineyard's wine is simply absurd, unless advertised as such in advance and with the focus on the wine rather than the food. 4) I don't have a better adjective to describe my thoughts on requiring for people to pay for paired wine they don't drink when they order by the bottle, but if I did, it wouldn't be a very friendly one. 5) Communal tables make a lot of sense at Cuba de Asia; not so much at anywhere people are likely to go on a special occasion. At nearly $200 a person, I'd say this place falls into the latter category.

This is a silly thing to say, both the ad homs and the substance of your message. You're right that no restaurant except for maybe a socialist co-op is going to examine their finances and say "you know what, we just made twice as much money this month as we did last month, let's print new menus and show our thanks to our customers with lower prices". What will happen is that the next time the place down the street raises its prices, our friendly credit-card guarantee restaurant won't need to, which will be happy for everyone. (You're not arguing that people don't take price into account when deciding to eat, are you? There's almost always some incentive to be able to offer a better deal than the competition.) Regarding your other suggestion, I would be fine with credit card guarantees only being required of known frequent reservation cancellers, but suspect this would be a pretty hard system to implement and would probably create more stress all around than a one size fits all policy. What happens when all of us eGulleter's start no-showing on our Steve Plotnicki reservations and ruin his "restaurant rating"? Do you need to provide your social security number to make reservations instead of a credit card? Obviously your suggestion is not quite literal, but it demonstrates some of the difficulties in dealing witht he problem.

Tommy: I'm not a regular at most of the places that I eat at, so the "different situation" describes most of my dining. In these cases, I wouldn't mind providing a guarantee that I forfeit at some reasonable time prior to dinner if I fail to show up. (The "reasonable time" relates to finding a replacement for me, so I can see how thirty minutes before my planned dinner doesn't cut it.) I'll take this a step further by suggesting that such a policy might actually decrease the prices at a restaurant, as consistently operating close to full capacity would decrease the amount of overhead that has to go on *my* bill. I don't find myself waiting for a table often, but it happens often enough (even at the best of places) that I wish there were a way to avoid it. If I confirmed my reservation on a credit card, and a table was not available at the appointed hour, I would expect the restaurant to provide some sort of compensation as a result. It would become a lot less likely for this to happen, though, as restaurants would have little incentive to overbook if they knew they would get paid for all of the tables. Chefette: I think in most cases, the "cancellation fee" is less than the price of an actual meal. At a place like The Herbfarm, this is obvious as they charge you $50 if you don't show up and something like $150 if you do. So, they don't want $50 worth of food from you, they want $50 worth of "profit" (I'm calling it that even though it's not quite accurate), which probably still doesn't quite cover the opportunity cost at a place with a high-end wine list.

Sure. I would hope that if I was a regular somewhere, I might be able to talk my way out of this now and then, but as a general concept, I'd be comfortable providing the restaurant with some protection against no-shows if they're willing to provide me with some protection against sitting around with no table available.

Southern Girl: Am I correct in reading that even if you order from their wine list, you still get charged for the wines poured with the meal? Do they really not have a no wine option? This seems silly, and in the case of under-21 diners, illegal.

Southern Girl: My post wasn't aimed at all at the line of questioning that you initiated, but at some of the responses that subsequently appeared. To answer your initial question: I don't have a problem with restaurants requiring credit card guarantees for tables, as long as they are willing to commit to actually having my table ready when I show up at the appropriate time. That's the trade off that makes the deal a win-win in other industries, and I wouldn't mind seeing it happen in restaurants, too. However, I would be extremely reluctant to make reservations at a place with a 30 day cancellation policy. My life is simply too chaotic for me to have any confidence that I wouldn't end up losing my money. I would consider 24 hours notice to be a reasonable requirement, and 48 hours to be the limit of what I would accept at anything but a truly unique and exceptional restaurant.

I think that if you agree to a cancellation policy, regardless of whether or not you think it is a good one, that you are honor-bound to abide by it, even if you are not legally obligated to do so. Agreeing to the policy and then charging back the cancellation penalty does not seem like an appropriate solution to a disagreeable policy; instead, simply do not go to the restaurant and tell them why you are not. If it is clear that the policy is hurting business rather than helping, the restaurant would presumably change it.

Is it possible to make reservations specifically for the sushi bar at Morimoto?

Let me caveat this by saying that I'm far from a sushi expert. I think if you limit yourself to sushi at Nobu you'd be doing yourself a great disservice. The sushi there is quite good, but the great thing about Nobu are the more creative dishes. Things like new style sashimi or rock shrimp tempura (or crab) in creamy spicy sauce are good, interesting dishes and are something you're much less likely to find a better version of elsewhere.

I don't remember anything about the food from my one and only visit, but it is perhaps the loudest restaurant I have ever been to.

The laws are inconsistent, but often this is a good thing. Health codes related to food preparation make perfect sense for a commercial restaurant, but would be unreasonable within a private home where fewer people are at risk as a result of your foul-up. It takes a different type of driver's license to drive a big rig than a passenger car, but since they are harder to operate and could cause more damage, this is desirable.

I am burdened with silly dining companions, what can I say?

Billy D: There are all sorts of regulations that apply to larger employers that do not apply to private homes, even in cases in which domestic employees are present.

If a vegetarian went to Jewel Bako, would he or she find anything to eat?

Wilfrid: What if you don't go to bars because they are too filled with smoke? I go to bars from time to time, but would probably go more if there was less smoke in them. Foodboy: It's entirely reasonable. People's right to smoke wherever they want doesn't go very far in this discussion--that's why most of the other comments have focused on the rights of the business to operate as they please. It's pretty weak to say that people should have the right to get their nicotine fix at the expense of other people dying. Is that really why you think we ought not to have a smoking ban? To answer your follow-up question, I've not advocated the total ban in the Bloomberg plan because there may be a few places where smoking is indeed fundamental to the businesses' operation. Cigar bars strike me as a perfectly obvious example of this. Other places, where the principal activity is drinking alcohol, the logic is much less apparent. Glenn: Isn't it allowed to have smoking even at tables in the "bar area"?

Foodboy: I think the point is to make them as safe as reasonably possible.