herbacidal

hey, how is this coming along?

thanks jude, i knew someone would get it. only 2 hours. cool. actually, now that i think about it, i wonder if i originally heard about it from this thread. thanx again.

I believe it had a reasonably good rep when it came out. haven't heard as much about it within the last year to eighteen months, with the new restaurants on the Wilmington scene. That's about it for my knowledge of it.

hey, i need help with name + author of book. it's about a guy who just sits in his car in manhattan. some people think he's weird, some just want the parking space. i thought it was an awesome premise. anyone?

sounds about right to me, especially about other kitchens eyeing / wooing alex away.

alex lee lives in queens, correct (i remember that from the fourth star)? anyway, that is definitely not a suprise. just wondering when it was going to happen. his continued tenure would be the reason daniel got more press than what i've always seen as the big 4 of NYC restaurants / NYC French restaurants (Jean George, Lespinasse, ADNY, Daniel) although others with more experience would have to comment further on accuracy. seems impossible to find someone with that level of talent, technique, etc. who wasn't overly ambitious to get out and do their own thing.

we'll just say at work in general. peanut butter, bread, apricot preserves. crystalized ginger, "hot" cajun mix, applesauce, and granola OR cereal bars (can't recall which).

i am so there. yay!

not so into the game. be willing to meet before/after for drinks/snacks/meals. depends on timing and scheduling, of course.

well, i don't know. tell ya what, get your tapas thing back together, invite us from up here, and then, we'll think about it.

more seriously, i know nothing about wine advertising, as opposed to beer and liquor ads.

but, oooh baby, they rock my world!!

i suppose that's true. but bourdain drew the new angle. anybody else who does anything that doesn't say all is well, happy happy joy joy is bound to be compared to him. which is fine, since he was first he's the barometer. now people gotta come up with tangents off that new angle, female POV, etc.

yea, i did leave vancouver out. long time ago, i actually would think the skill level in vancouver now is, if not better than, at least as good as Taiwan and HK. Sun Sui Wah I would suspect is leading the Vancouver Chinese food scene, and may be leading it to areas not seen in Taiwan and HK. Yea, that's the way I feel. Except for the fact that I've been to so many, and I never really see anything new. I usually try to opt out of going.

i knew it! you care more about the buzz than the substance. don't forget about cool drinks for the kiddies and those resistant to alcohol abuse.

yea, i wouldn't be suprised if this was available in LA and NYC. there's more of a mass. Phila doesn't have the density necessary. The banquet givers in LA also have more dinero. Actually, how are the chefs' skill level in LA as compared to Taiwan and HK? Yea, $300 a table is the standard, probably across the US. I've had the most of these. The one I mentioned as being chef's birthday, that was probably on the order of $1000 a table. That was mind blowing, so much so, that i lost most of it that night. Haven't gotten it back yet. Actually I would say that's about 90% of the time. At least for weddings, christenings, etc. That's the reason Chinese are willing to blow half, sometimes more than that, of their annual income on a son/daughter's wedding. Really? I'm not so sure about this. All of the times we've gotten a private room, we did get really good service. But again, I suspect this was due primarily to knowing the chefs and staff rather than having the private room. Actually all the times we've had a private room in my experience has been the restaurant giving it to us b/c we are frequent customers/friends.

well, there's high end banquets, and more mundane banquets. but yea sharks fin is tasty. i remember when we closed down one of our restaurants. before turning it over to the new operators, we took a whole buncha stuff home. probably a couple thousand USD of sharks fin. Yea, there's less of that in Philly. The banquet givers don't have as much money to dump into the dinner. Probably hafta have a banquet in HK or Taiwan to check stuff like that out. yup definitely a worthy ploy. at this point, we can bypass stuff like that. primarily because if we dispute anything with someone else we're eating with, the staff will side with us. side benefit from dad knowing management, staff, and the kitchen of any restaurant we go to in chinatown.

yea, i'm really jealous too. same thing with respect to philly. only consolation is that we had some awesome red beans and rice, bread pudding, among other cajun stuff last night at our DDC dinner. ah well, the fire has been started, let it be a slow burn til the appetite has been quenched.

sounds like most of the chinese banquets i've been to. never had the winter melon in melon before. same for beggar's chicken. a deprived chinese childhood.

here in philly, we have a bar that is probably the most famous bar special around town: can of PBR and shot of Beam, $3. PBR ain't bad, but it ain't Yuengling, my fav cheap beer.

it does sound really cool. i'm just imagining certain caucasians with minimal chopstick dexterity trying to do that.

been to numerous chinese banquets in philadelphia, probably high double digits. only one was actually memorable, and that was b/c it was a chef's birthday party. don't remember that much about the food, except that it was all stuff i hadn't seen before. now that was something else. if only i could remember it. haven't been to any in hong kong. been to a few in china. most of those blend together too. nothing especially notable.

yup. major props to you, louisa. look forward to seeing your continual progress. h

i go to new york for the same reasons, bigjas. what i would like: japanese that isn't sushi (soba, ramen, takoyaki, wagashi, etc.) south indian georgian & other former USSR cuisines sara, have you been to the 2 new vietnamese places at 11th and washington? don't remember their names. haven't been myself, jes wondering.

addendum to menton's post, blue in green's sansom st locale is also good. i was just there for 1pm breakfast sunday. on sansom at jeweler's row, between 7th and 8th. sansom itself is a smaller street just south of chestnut.