balmagowry

Stop thinking in terms of origin and destination and start thinking in terms of the journey. It's likely a bottleneck somewhere between those people who can't see the images and the canticlecomm server. The appropriate test for this would be to run a traceroute from the user host to the server. Sure, but who's going to do that? I take your point about the journey, but the way I look at it I'm not responsible for the journey. My chief concern is to make sure I'm not neglecting, or screwing up, any part of the process that I am responsible for. It's all academic now, since the problem seems to be resolved - have heard back from Soba and Jason and according to them all is well. I'm losing sleep over Jinmyo, though.

Of bread? Well, I spose it is kind of an alien life-form, but I thought that got baked out of it....

You know I do... don't you? If not, refresh your memory up-thread!

Whew! Now if only I know Jinmyo does too, I'll be happy. You gotta be kidding. Who has TIME to snack while blogging?! Actually, I forgot to mention that I did snarf up the rest of those grapes at my desk. And hey, don't forget the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! Also, I've just discovered a bag of potato chips... Don't worry. I ain't gonna starve. Eek! Gotta fly, or I'll miss the train into town! Later, guys -

SethG and Lucy - gee, shucks, you guys. Thanks! Lucy, I almost had a similar problem in the Fruitery; I was trying to be unobtrusive about my activities, shooting with available light etc., and I got away with it until the last shot, the bread. A woman in deli apron/uniform came up to me and asked "why are you taking a picture of the bread?" At this point I'm sure I blew a great opportunity. If I had been more like you and she more like your French shopkeepers, I would have engaged her in charming conversation about eGullet and so on and persuaded her to pose for me. But she was squat and suspicious-looking and approached me with a chip on her shoulder; I'm sure she thought I was spying for the FDA or something; I felt for her, and I had a feeling I wouldn't have much success getting her to see the lovely exciting side of what I was doing, so I just muttered something lame about wanting to show someone what it looked like, then shut off the camera and shoved it in my pocket and sloped off. She seemed appeased, but I don't imagine she believed me. Hope she doesn't lose any sleep over it. Re the doorway - thank you again. It's really pretty simple to do: you make the link to the image, and make the link to the site, and you take the entire image code and nest it in the URL code where the highlighted text would normally go. Depending on which machine/browser I'm working from, sometimes I can do all this inline, sometimes I have to create the two links separately and then cut/paste them. Re Brown Cow - I'm looking forward to tasting it, but as you probably know I'm really looking forward to trying it as a starter for my own. Eventually I am determined to reach the point where I don't have to buy any yogurt at all. Seth - oh yes, I used to bake all my own bread - Sunday was baking-day, every week without fail, and I generally made a nice crusty peasanty loaf, experimenting with different blends of flours and yeasts. I also used to make the world's best (modesty aren't us) English Muffins. Someday I will get back to this; and at some point in the course of the blog I'll have more to say about how I lost the habit. In the interim, I am very grateful to have this Brooklyn-born Portuguese bread! (And in fact I've never made one with quite that texture; haven't tried, though. It has sort of the same mouthfeel as a round Italian loaf I used to love, made with a biga - but the crust is quite different.) Lucy - the documentary... hmmmmm. It has been shown a couple of times on the BBC, and it occaisonally runs here on the little-known Ovation cable channel (I remember one Thanksgiving day Håkan Hagegård called me up, out of the blue, and said, "Hej! I'm watching you on television!" - I figured he'd finally gone completely off his rocker. But of course he was in town, rehearsing at the met, and subletting an apartment which boasted that particular channel, so it was all on the level. ) Anyway, I honestly don't know whether there is any official way to get a copy of it. But... well, let me look into it. And meanwhile I promise to regale you with still photos, not only from the docco itself, but from behind the scenes! If I don't have time to do much of it this week I'll make a separate thread and/or web page for it afterward.

Thank you, Squeat. I've PM'd Soba to ask whom to ask, in case there's something about eG/Invision protocol that for some reason I haven't conformed to. We'll figure it out somehow! Anyone who isn't getting the images, please PM me and tell me what browser and machine you're using. (I don't see any logical reason that that would be relevant, but the essence of diagnosis is finding a pattern; and the essence of finding a pattern is knowing as much as possible about all its elements, no matter how inconsequential!)

Carolyn - tell me you can see the pictures!

Damn! This is really weird - I've never had a problem like it before. And BTW the images are not in my cache - I've been flushing all caches frequently; I have also loaded the blog and the pages on four different computers, ranging from Shtinky to my father's dial-up iMac, and have no trouble with the images or the auxiliary pages, everything comes up just fine. So what is going on with you and Jinmyo - and is anyone else having this problem? I know Lucy and Owen are getting the pictures. Browser implementation? DNS? Dang. Here, try another page: http://www.canticlecomm.com/egullet/foodbl...rys/detail.html wouldja? and if that's no good, try typing in the URL from scratch. And try clearing caches and refreshing your browser window. And try - blast, I don't know, but I'll go back and look at them, and if necessary I'll import them all to ImageGullet... but there's a lot of 'em and it'll take hours to do, so if there's another solution I sure would prefer to find it. The images are simple optimized jpegs and the html is primitive in its simplicity. I don't get it!

Whoa - I got so carried away responding to the O'Brian question that I forgot all about Good Morning, and coffee, and breakfast, for which it's now too late. Well, good morning, or good afternoon, or whatever it is. Because I'm uncomfortably aware of the backlog, I think I'd better give you a quick rundown/preview of undocumented activity to date and plans for the near future. Let's see - Saturday. Lunch was The Boy's Friday leftovers. I didn't really participate in this because I was busy wolfing my way through one of those lovely fresh Portuguese breads. Dinner - skirt steak on the new grill; artichokes with a mayonnaise-thickened vinaigrette; mushrooms and shallots in wine sauce. Dessert... no, I'm not telling yet. You'll see when I put up the picture. Yesterday. It was COLD. I hadn't bargained for that. Postponed gardening activities, but still invited myself to make dinner in Gilgo. Breakfast: one of the pears I showed you Saturday. Lunch: steak sandwiches (leftover skirt steak on toasted and buttered Portuguese bread, oh so good). Dinner: mostly Russian - Blinchiki and Beef Kotletkii with Sauce Smitane; broccoli rabe; peas (my father doesn't like broc. rabe); noodles. Lunch today: last night's leftovers. Yum. And I still have some of those little artichokes from Saturday night. I love cold artichokes.... Tonight. Don't know yet. Here's the deal. The Boy being away for a couple of days (poor thing missed last night's lovely russian dinner), my father and a friend and I will go without him to NYC: we have been asked to attend a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Toscanini's final concert. I'm not quite sure what the event entails, but it will be over before dinner-time. After that we are leaving it loose because we don't know whether the Toscaninis have dinner plans and if so whether or not they include us - everything seems to be rather vague. The celebration itself is down in the NYU area, so if we're on our own (or maybe even if we're not) I am hoping to re-discover a certain Chinese noodle joint in that area that I used to love. If I had any brains I would have posted a query on the NY forum... but we'll chance it. It used to be called Mrs. Lee's - last I went there it had changed hands but was still good and still serving the noodle-and-dumpling fare I long for (one of the deficiencies of the Guyland - this part of it at least - alas, no noodle shops). 13th and University. Wish me luck! If it isn't there or isn't what I hope... well, I'm not sure what we'll do. But I'm sure we'll find something - there's no dearth of choices in the naked city. Oh! OMG I just realized that the eG Grand Sichuan dinner is this Thursday, i.e. during my blog stint. Hmmm. Cool.

I quite agree with you. A few small howlers, but overall I thought it was marvelously done and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Balex, you're a great straight man. I'm glad you asked. You may not be, though, by the time I finish answering! The toasted cheese was *all right*, though it didn't meet my exacting standards for historical accuracy - the worst of that, though, was in the presentation; they obviously completely misunderstood the use of the Doctor's Toasted Cheese Dish. But the spotted dog was kind of pathetic. And the Floating Archipelago in the Shape of the Galapagos was... an abomination! Let me say it now and get it out of the way: Yes! Yes, I know it isn't a movie about food! That, of course, is why I was able to enjoy it as much as I did. And I did. But if they were going to make such a hash out of one of the best, and funniest, food scenes in the entire canon, then why exactly did they bother to study my book and to call me and e-mail me and fax me sections of the screenplay and discuss it all with me so seriously and in such detail? Eh? I know the answer to this - and also to their childish behavior in the matter of fees - because they're movie people and they consider themselves above, and set apart from, the logic of other beings. Like Bill Gates, they don't care, because they don't have to. They pulled the same kind of crap with Geoff Hunt, but at least in his case they paid attention to his work and to what he said. Ooof. OK, there's my spleen on the subject. Thanks for letting me vent. Moving on to the substance of the problem.... I was warned ahead of time (by friends from the crew of the Rose) that after all that they had decided to use chocolate for the Archipelago, so I was sort of braced. It's anachronistic as hell, of course, but I figured they had used chocolate sauce instead of custard because it would be more telegenic. White islands against a dark-brown sea - better contrast and visually more interesting than white islands against a pale yellow sea. Fair enough, given that they could assume that only about half a dozen people on the planet would care and/or know better. But in the event, I was giving them too much credit. I have spent a pretty considerable proportion of my life's supply of energy and devotion on the subject of this particular interpretation of Ile Flottante. In its authentic form it is a far, far cry from the one Lucy had at the cafeteria last week, but it is an even farther cry from the depiction in the movie. What was that gooey, dark blue-green stuff they used for the sea? What was that mountain of blackish gelatinous stuff they used for the islands? And... between two contiguous dark saturated colors, where was the telegenic contrast I thought they were trying for? What could have possessed any responsible prop master (and when I spoke to him the guy certainly seemed sensible enough) to think that after XX months at sea they would have anything aboard remotely resembling the wherewithal to construct such a thing? Laughable. Or rather cry-able. That they turned the scenario itself inside out, thereby undermining most of the humor in it, is only to be expected of movie people, who always seem to have these compulsions to "improve" great material by dumbing it down. But to anyone paying attention to detail, that Archipelago was a slap in the face. As it happens, I have not only built the Genuine Archipelago twice, but on the second occasion I served it in that self-same Great Cabin of that self-same ship; we had built it at a scale of 2"=1 nautical mile, and being quite topographically correct it was so big we could barely get it through the companionway! Look at a map of the Galapagos and you will see why. As it was, we had to put the Redondo Rock (which BTW is not a huge dollop at that scale but a tiny thing, not more than 1/2" in diameter) in a separate little saucer by itself, to get the proper geographical relationship. BTW, that was another oddity (which, again, is understandable for practical purposes, but which was nevertheless inevitably jarring to me): the way they had the Great Cabin set up for those dining scenes. Obviously they had to do it so they could use a tracking dolly, but it looked very weird to me to have the captain's table running fore and aft (i.e. across the breadth of the cabin, of which it ain't got much) instead of port and starboard. It is not a big space, as I well know from having served there an elaborate 19th-c banquet for 12, with three cameramen, a sound man, and a still photographer maneuvering around us! It's a wonder we could get around the table at all (though one of the cameramen very kindly got himself slung off the stern so he could shoot through the sternlights, thus providing a little precious breathing space). To squeeze all those guys and that table running the short way athwart the cabin was... well, like I said, it seemed jarring and silly to anyone familiar with the layout of the (or any) ship. I'm sorry - I should explain that the episode I'm describing here - banquet, Archipelago, cameramen etc. - was part of the BBC's documentary "Patrick O'Brian: Nothing Personal." My mother and I coordinated most of the New York area portion of the operation, including planning and preparing this dinner, to which we invited a goodly handful of O'Brianite luminaries: Dean King, Geoff Hunt, Patrick Tull, Walter Cronkite, Dennis Flanagan, Ken Ringle, Hank Burchard, Peter Stanford. (And this, BTW, was also the occasion on which I had reason to be so utterly disgusted with Mr. W.F. Buckley...! ) Capt. Bailey took the head of the table and Patrick Tull the foot, and the latter did readings of appropriate passages for each course. So - er - I claim to know whereof I speak. I have photographs of all this, of course, and since I was thinking about doing something like this anyway, a little later in the week I will take you on another time-travel excursion and show you the construction and presentation of the true Floating Archipelago in the Shape of the Galapagos. You'll never want to eat black jello again.

Hmmm - I kinda like doing these composite thingies. This is my ode to the Fruitery in West Islip. It's a relatively small market by Conspicuous Consumption standards (though you should have seen my Mallorquin friend open his eyes wide at its size and scope!). It ain't got everything, but much of what it do have is cherce, and for those things I like it a lot better than the chain behemoths. It isn't really named the Fruitery. It never was. When it first opened some years ago (eight, maybe?) it went under the name of The Produce Warehouse, and I think it had a couple of other branches on the Guyland. Ma and I dubbed it the Fruitery early on, one of those things where one of us couldn't remember its name and therefore referred to it by its function; the other understood instantly; and the rest is history. Or philology. Or something. Worst of it is, the name spread around among our circle, so we have corrupted several friends and neighbors. OTOH, that has its advantages - the place has been through a couple of changes of management without changing its general emphasis and format - and we, who have stuck to our own nomenclature throughout, have been very little troubled by having to keep track of the changes! Still, it's occasionally a bit puzzling for newcomers.... The Best Yet incarnation is part of a small local chain, about 10 stores, named for one Charles Best. This management actually looks as though (ptui ptui ptui spit between my fingers I shouldn't jinx it) it might be here for the long haul. From the beginning they've had good produce. They can no longer be counted on to undersell all the other markets in the area; OTOH, they can no longer be counted on to go out of business every other week, either. All in all, it's not a bad trade-off. Pears and grapes look good. $2.49/lb. is an awful lot for grapes, compared to what I've been paying the past couple of months... but I'm in a hurry and I'm craving them, and they are exactly the way I like them; hell with it, I'm buying some. Decent price for Anjou pears, though - a few of those go into the basket too. Saturday is a good day for casing the joint. Everyone else under the sun is buying supplies for the week - I'm just getting a few things I need immediately, checking to see what looks good this week, and slipping out via the express lane. (At some point I must remember to fulminate about the cockamamie timing of the advertising flyers! But not now - as I said, I'm in a hurry.) Hmmmm - green peppers are on sale. Salady stuff - nice as always, nothing out of the ordinary, though the broccoli rabe is looking unusually lush. Ah - Vidalia onions are in. When the Produce Warehouse opened its doors it did have a meat department, but not one that inspired much confidence. In fact, you wouldn't really have wanted to get near it - it had that vaguely butcher's-dumpster smell. Thank you very much, we'll stick to the other side of the store. Under new management, however, things changed drastically for the better. Meat department is still small, but they get some mighty nice stuff sometimes. Today, for instance: I love skirt steak! Can't remember the last time I had it (though I vividly remember the first time ). Something for later this week - maybe we can finally get the new grill going. Another useful thing: they carry those industrial-size containers of spices. Not always practical, if the stuff is just going to be sitting around (and I am not as good as I should be about keeping my spice rack up to date... ), but great if you're testing recipes, or baking a lot of bread (I haven't been, lately, but I used to, and someday I'll get back to it) with caraway, poppy, sesame seeds.... Spose if I were rich I'd only ever buy that stuff at Sherry's. But I'm not, and there's nothing wrong with these. Hmph. Aaaaahhhhh... and here is another really really really really REALLY REALLY good reason for coming to this market: This is some of the best bread I've ever had. Actually... OK, I can't really say that because there are so many different kinds of bread to love, and comparing them is an apples-and-oranges thing. That said, I adore this bread. I think it's made by that bakery in Brooklyn whose name keeps slipping my mind (anyone?) - name starts with a K, I seem to think. Portuguese. It has a chewy crust and a flavorful duff, not too dense, and when it's really fresh I can make a meal of it by itself, just tearing into it, red in tooth and claw. I've been known to finish the first loaf on the drive home (about 5 minutes) - I'm a virtuoso at shifting while eating, or vice versa. Day or so old, it still toasts beautifully and makes a wonderful robust sandwich. Four of 'em, into the basket. (I hesitated over whether to call it a roll or a loaf - it's actually somewhere in-between, about the size of a pain batard). 1/2 gallon of milk, and ho! for the express checkout. The bags are on the passenger seat next to me and the bread is tempting; even more so, however, are the grapes. I inhale about half of them on the way down Higbie Lane. I don't think there'll be any of them left for tomorrow's breakfast. Next stop: sheesh, in real time it's 4:00 AM. How did that happen? (As if I didn't know.) Next stop: bed. But next bloggital stop: Saturday's Dinner, or I Would Have Made A Terrible Boy Scout.

Only it isn't exactly without delay, these being the duties of Saturday morning. So - as I mentioned earlier - it's now 12:30 on Saturday afternoon. I have just left my stretch class and am headed over to Sherry's in hopes of finding the elusive Brown Cow. A faint, faint mooing is heard in the distance, giving me renewed hope as I cross the parking lot. This is Sherry's as seen from the parking lot in back - much more convenient than having to schlep around by Deer Park Avenue. I think of Sherry's as the Alice's Restaurant of health-food stores - you really can get just about anything you want. The rare exception has to be special-ordered - and is, with a minimum of fuss. Here again, the people are really nice, helpful but not overwhelming. They once gave me a $50-buck bottle of I-forget-what-supplement because it was within a couple of weeks of its sell-by date. To give you a sense of the selection... This is a composite of some of the pictures I took in the course of this quest. You can take a closer look at them if you like - look, the door is open: Click on it to go inside. Alas, the one thing on earth they still don't have is the one thing I'm looking for. They do have Brown Cow yogurt (not to mention various sheep, goat and soy yogurts, plus kefirs and milks and creams of every stripe) - but still no plain. And somehow I don't think I want to try using Maple or Strawberry as a starter. With this incredible wealth and selection right here at hand, will I have to go into the - gasp - city to get it? No - I am in luck. This time I find the clerk who finds the other clerk who identifies the right manager and calls out my request. "Cream top or low-fat?" she calls back. "Cream top!" I answer, mentally adding "of course." Brief pause. Comes the reply: "We can get it in Wednesday or Thursday." For a split second it seems to me that Wednesday-or-Thursday is an awfully long way off. Then I remember how busy I expect to be between now and then, and how easy it is to procure perfectly decent yogurt in the interim. So I smile brightly, thank politely, and go on my way rejoicing. Next stop... the Fruitery. [EDIT to try to disentangle some of the time-travel tensifications.]

Oooh - I feel guilty for posting so seldom and at such odd hours - worried you might think I'm cheating by not fooding. Hoo boy, am I fooding. Living the blog turns out to be a full-time occupation. Makes me wonder how normal people ever find time to work! Anyway, before I move on to yesterday morning (oy vey!), here's a small lagniappe for Friday night - this is what the rest of the Delphi diner looks like before dark: (The car in front of it is my faithful old Honda Civic, as discussed on the Pressure Cooker Recipes thread.) BTW, my father reminds me that before the place went Greek it was known as the Yankee Trader - a serviceable ordinary diner where he and his disreputable associates used to have lunch 30-some years ago when they reverse-commuted to do runout dates and school performances in this area.

Got it. It's definitely gone - I think that's approximately where West Marine is now - or maybe Rising Dragon or Don Ricardo's (about both of which I shall have more to say later in the week).

It was kind of John to put it that way; he is not what most people today would view as "illustrious," though in his way he was a pivotal character among what Mel Brooks called "the great and the near-great." (I disagree with Most People, of course, but I am well aware that I am in the minority.) His name was Samuel Chotzinoff. EDIT to add: Uh-oh - John, you weren't confusing him with, er, a certain someone else, were you?

Mongo, for someone unfamiliar with the novels that is an extraordinarily astute observation. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am certainly impressed. The muting of the doctor's character is indeed one of my chief difficulties with the film. Whether the original Maturin is really intended as anything so straightforward as a corrective to the tendency you mention is a subject for some debate; O'Brian was not a simple man, and his works certainly demonstrate that. But he (Maturin, that is) should have, could have, served that purpose in the film, and he didn't. He is perhaps the most complex and interesting character in the novels - and where was that in the film? Fair enough. But to be fair on the other side of the equation, the greater part of the series does not take place at sea, and while the Royal Navy and the Napoleonic wars are not often far out of the picture, what really works in the novels is the sheer quality of the writing, narrative sweep, character depiction. The people (in all walks of life) are fascinating as people, the period detail is incredibly rich. Yup - absolutely right. (And as a rule I don't.) David Threlfall played Killick - very well, I thought, though shamefully under-used - but for me he will always be Smike in the RSC's tremendous "Nicholas Nickleby."

Wow. Well, I can't say them's fightin' words, but given the impact that movie has been having on the O'Brian community for the past 10 years (i.e. yes, long before it was made), it sure feels funny to see it dismissed like that. Amazing - there's a Real World out there! and it doesn't revolve around Jack Aubrey! Well, FWIW I must say I really enjoyed the movie, despite a couple of jarring notes. Most of which I will not go so far OT as to bore you with here. But I do have a very serious bone to pick with the food treatment, and that I will discuss here some time in the next couple of days, since you guys are really the only crowd, other than O'Brian fans, to which it'll have any meaning (and no, you don't have to be an O'Brian reader for such discussion, not at all). And OK, while I'm at it I might as well admit I'm not overly impressed with the way they handled me....

I wish you could have, too. (And we would have had at least two extra orders of fries.)

OK, now you've got me confused. On the left as you enter town from which direction? Are you saying the former-diner-now-chinese-restaurant was the place in question? That would work if you're coming from the west. But if you're coming from the east, then the Delphi is on your left just as (well, OK, just barely before) you enter town. And as of now, there's no other diner, or diner-like thing, on Main Street. Except Glen's Dinette, on the north side of Main in the middle of town, but I believe that's been there since the Flood, and it isn't really a diner, as such. Maybe I need to post a map, or something. I can't even picture where this diner would have been. There are, however, a couple of fairly new enclaves, those genteel upscale mini-strip-mall things, and either of them may well have replaced a diner. Considering how close it is to the Delphi (and also to the Carousel on Higbie Lane, also in WI), I can see where another diner in town might have been overkill at some point. Babylon never got quite as down-at-heel as Bay Shore did, but it certainly had its seedy years from an economic standpoint - followed by a substantial rebirth around 10-15 years ago (Bay Shore is just starting to do the same now). I still mourn the loss of that strange variety store on Deer Park Ave. - shouldn't, because the expanded Sherry's which has moved in there is a marvelous resource for me. But that old place had such character! and such weird superannuated merchandise! Oh well. Win some, lose some, I guess.

Um... you were right. It was.

Yup, it was. But look - I found it! Lately I've begun to wonder (I think I mentioned this on the Yogurt-Making thread) whether "Balmagowry" might not turn out to be some intricate corruption of "creme bulgare." Reaching, I know.

Oh Mongo, I'm so sorry; I certainly never meant to disillusion anyone. But think of it this way. Cary Grant may have begun life as Archibald Leach, but as far as I'm concerned Cary Grant is his real name. So... extrapolate. The balmagowry name has not been explained here, but I know there was some discussion of it a little while back - I'll hunt it down and link it later. Not a light task, as I fear it may be buried somewhere in the Cookbook Tally thead....

In Babylon itself? No. But this place is also on the south side of Montauk Highway and it's barely outside the limits of Babylon Village - I trust you're not, um, confusing the two? No, of course you wouldn't be, you're a local. Sorry. Where was it? There's a place right in the village, on the north side of Montauk Hwy, that bears all the architectural hallmarks of having once been a diner, but it has long been converted into a Chinese restaurant. It's just a door or two west of the old Town Hall, practically across from the movie theatre. Ring any bells? BTW, I have a feeling they're a little less lax about carding these days....

I've been thinking about this diner thing; there's something lurking in my mind that I haven't yet expressed. The reason I wanted to go there the other night - well, mainly I just wanted to. But as I think I mentioned up-thread, I was also bearing in mind Lucy's experience chez M. Pierre, and the comparison between the two places, thinking it might be amusing. In the event, I'm not so sure "amusing" is the word. There is no comparison, you will say - and of course we all thought exactly that when Lucy suggested that a bouchon was the equivalent of a diner and then immediately proceeded to explode that definition by showing us the bouchon. The thing about the Delphi, though, the thing I'm trying to get a handle on, is that there's something unpretentious about its pretentions, if you see what I mean. Yes, there are sections of the menu that are over-ambitious and incongruous, and the gussied-up dishes under that heading are not often well-executed. Yes, the place itself is tarted up with chrome and neon and gaudy pictures. But underneath all that crap it's still a diner. It does diner things well, and a few non-diner things superbly, and it has nothing to be ashamed of. The staff is friendly - not obtrusively so - and obliging. And sincere. Not a one of 'em but really cares that you get what you want and are content with it. At heart it's a neighborhood place, and it walks like one and quacks like one. Weirdly, there's something endearing about the things they occasionally get wrong (such as an inexperienced busboy, the other night, letting dishes clatter and make a hell of a racket when he cleared a table - no wonder he's on the late shift...). I'm not enough of a regular to be acquainted with any of the staff, but there are some such and you can tell that they love the place and it loves them. My father and I went out to dinner to mark my mother's birthday, the first one since her death. He loves the Outback; she wasn't crazy about it but would go there (and enjoy it once she got there, I might add) to indulge him. So when he proposed it I of course agreed. Trouble is, it was a Saturday night and the lines were... well, it was Saturday night. We decided to try something different. Thinking about what might have amused my mother, I suggested the diner. (And that was the night I first tried the aforementioned veal chop. And a glass of quite execrable wine, which under the circumstances I strangely enjoyed.) On an extraordinarily difficult occasion, it proved exactly the right place to be. It's that kind of place. Despite the oceans (literally) of difference in decor and cuisine and culture, the bell that all this rings for me is the honesty that Lucy evoked in her portrait of M. Pierre's bouchon. One is lyrical and poetic; the other solid with a veneer of silliness; but at bottom they share that quality you look for in a place of comfort food; they're genuine. They're real. Both are guided by the same principle; and the same impulse might guide you to either one. Hey, it's a diner. I'm lucky to have it nearby.

Good morning. Some like it cold. Don't you hate it when the first thing you see in the morning is an unexpected temptation lying across your path? I don't know where these things come from... but I'm a sucker for them. :sigh: No fair - not before coffee!