MarketStEl

Somehow this discussion fell off my radar screen.... Can you elaborate on this a bit? I just checked my county library system and they don't have access to this book or any other work by the author so I'm flying somewhat blind in this discussion. But my closest friend for the past 25 years happens to be African-American as is my significant other (a coincidence but it has given me an exposure to African-American family life that the typical Caucasian male rarely gets). If I think about his late mom, his sister, his aunts and cousins, my former and current girlfriends and their families etc. all of whom I've gotten to know pretty well... none of them owns or uses cookbooks - at least not a single one that I know of. Am I working from such a statistically insignificant sampling that no conclusion can be drawn from those facts or are cookbooks written by African-American authors purchased mostly by white folks? And do you think such cookbooks were or are written with a conscious or sub-conscious recognition of who the likely reader is and would that possibility affect the sub-text of the writing? ← thecuriousone beat me to this, but I can tell you that my relatives who cooked in the soul food tradition had nary a cookbook to their name. On the other hand, Grandma Smith, whose cooking was more Middle American, did have a few cookbooks, though I can't recall ever seeing her actually consult one before starting work. And I grew up with a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book on hand -- purchased by my father, who was the bigger cook in our family. (There was a copy of the I Hate to Cook Book and its sequel, the I Hate to Housekeep Book, in the headboard of the bed in my parents' bedroom. My guess is that both of these entered our library via Mom.) Most of the soul food cooking I remember from childhood took place on Mom's side of the family. This recollection goes a long way towards explaining phaelon56's confusion over the existence of African-American cookbooks, for my mom's family was one step up from the farm, while my dad's family were solidly (old) black middle class -- Granddad was a servant for one of Kansas City's most prominent families and Grandma was a nurse's aide at a Catholic hospital in the city. Cookbooks were not alien to black middle class households, even if they were few in number and rarely consulted; they could nonetheless provide inspiration -- and the African-American cookbook was a permanent reminder of the tradition that we inherited (whether or not we stayed true to it). The principal African-American cookbook discussed in Secret Ingredients is Freda DeKnight's A Date With a Dish (1948). Ebony readers will immediately recognize the title as that of the magazine's long-running recipe feature--there's been one in every issue since the magazine launched in 1945--and DeKnight issued an updated version, The Ebony Cookbook: A Date With a Dish, in 1977. (DeKnight's successor as Ebony's food editor, Charlotte Lyons, produced The New Ebony Cookbook in 1999.) Since this post was largely inspired by phaelon56's query about whether African-Americans consulted cookbooks, I hope that Amazon.com customer Dean Brassfield of North Hollywood, California, doesn't mind my sharing his review of the 1977 edition with all of you: (emphasis added; I assume I don't need to tell you who the Gates family or Mr. Bryant are) I suspect this might just be a bit more common than we suspect. Which can only mean that even among some African Americans, there was a need for written references, which became "secrets" of their own. BTW and FWIW, among the titles in my own cookbook collection is a mass-market paperback called A Pinch of Soul, published in the late 1970s. The chili recipe in this book is very close to the chili I ate growing up -- which was thicker and meatier than most chili I've eaten since.

I still have my copy of the first edition in my cookbook collection and consult it often for inspiration, if not necessarily for guidance about where to eat. It's a wonderful, and wonderfully written, introduction to the world of barbecue. I hope the list of the 100 BBQ Joints has been revised and updated. Many have gone, and many worthy newcomers have opened, since the book first appeared. I have whipped up a few of the rubs and sauces from the recipe section in the back, but I have yet to attempt a batch of Barbecue Honey. I think I need to invest in asbestos gloves first.

You. Look. Sharp! I'd have you do custom work for me if I could afford it. (Edited to add: Unfortunately, the cufflinks were just cropped out of this picture.) Soul food I know. I can't stand chitlins, but the rest of it is wonderful. Given what most Chinese restaurants serve non-Chinese, I find this revelation quite a surprise, and a pleasant one. Might dishes like this be what I would get if I ordered from the menu that's only printed in Chinese at some Chinese restaurants? Edited much later to add: On the way back from the gym, it struck me that one other thing that might tie these two cuisines together is that they are "common" fare rather than haute cuisine. The foods we call "soul food" are made from the stuff the master didn't want or wouldn't touch. Its kissing cousin, "Southern cooking," is largely the cooking of the Southern non-gentry, though the high/low boundary in Southern cookery is not as sharp as that separating what the master ate from what the slaves ate. I don't recall seeing this sort of cooking at the Chinese New Year banquets the Chinese Cultural Center in Philly's Chinatown throws annually. Is there a similar divide between what everyday Chinese ate and what was served, say, in the Forbidden City, or what the provincial mandarins ate?

I knew KC had come of age when it began to embrace rather than hide its wide-open, Jazz Age past during "Boss Tom's" heyday. If I understand the chronology in The Grand Barbecue correctly, KC 'cue also got its start in this same era. And the city began to celebrate 'cue before it celebrated its jazzier side, so you could say that food was the gateway to self-confidence for the city.

You might want to consider starting a new topic in Food Traditions & Culture....

If I were in this situation, I'd be thinking of spending my time in Tahiti rather than in court. ← A chacun son gout, Charlie. I've been in this city as long as Rick's been at the Market, and it's been almost that long since my first freelance article in Philly appeared in the pages of PGN. I have no plans, or desire, to chuck my keyboard and sheath my pen anytime soon. In fact, I hope to be doing what I enjoy doing still when I'm 70. I get Rick's sentiment exactly here.

Just about everything that's been raised, discussed, and pureed over on that thread about Detroit is encapsulated in that New York Times article, which I imagine is being clipped and saved (figuratively speaking) throughout metropolitan Kansas City. It also reminds me anew how clueless many East Coast denizens still are about our nation's heartland and its cities. Johnson County's always been spectacularly wealthy; the folks in NYC are only now understanding it? Because some of them have Sprint cell phone service or visited town for a convention? (See, there's that inner Kansas Citian springing up in me, getting all defensive about my forever hometown.) Still, the Times reporter did an excellent job.

This may sound like a tautology, but if you don't have a lot of money to spend on food, you're not going to buy expensive food, even if you would prefer it for its quality. I'm not sure it's that people WANT their food to be as cheap as possible. For some, I think it's that they NEED it to be as cheap as possible. Conversely, the producers also NEED it to be as cheap as possible in order to sell lots of it at a decent profit. You might say the deck is stacked against quality, and you'd probably be right. Food isn't technology, thank God.

Will we be treated to any Texas 'cue on this trip, BTW? You're not that far from the the Texas BBQ belt, IIRC. (I now recall a foodblog that I can't seem to dig up which was a zig-zag tour across this territory. It also introduced me to one of the most vivid descriptive phrases for weather I've ever run across: "napalm summer breeze." Judging from what I've seen on TV, heat isn't the weather problem besetting Texas this year.)

I'll agree that the list is painted with a *very* wide brush[...] ← ...so wide that the readers' choice for Best Thai Restaurant is all the way across the state in Grand Rapids. I think we can safely discard this survey as an authoritative source for great food in Detroit. And what does it say when the readers say you have to drive cross-state for the best Thai?

Excellent point. And Downtown carries varieties I've never seen at DiBruno's. Remember what I said about Philadelphians being slaves to the past over in the other thread? My first encounter with a good cheese shop in Philly was DiBruno's, and that was back when they hadn't upgraded their selection to where they have it now. I'd long thought of their cheeses as good buys, and I am resistant to paying more than I have to for anything until I'm given a very good reason to do so (Pennsylvania Noble cheese being one of those very good reasons, for instance). That's less the case now than then, but old habits die hard.

That's ridiculous; of course it is! Heck, Stamford and Greenwich and much of Fairfield County are suburbs of New York, towns in which large numbers of commuters drive or take the train into the city every day. There is a difference between a commuter town and a suburb. One might call suburbs "residential areas on the outskirts of, and contiguous to a city or large town." If they weren't officially part of NYC, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island could be considered "suburbs of Manhattan." A classic suburb, in my opinion, would be one that is largely dependent on the city which it "subs" for most things other than residential space, grocery stores and the like. It shouldn't take an hour on the train to get from a "sub" to an "urb" to work at your job or go to a restaurant. If it does, you're in a commuter town. ← Okay, I understand your distinction now, even though I would suggest to you that it is one that is no longer widely observed; most people use the term "suburb" to encompass those communities you call "commuter towns" as well as those more dependent on the core city -- and that's in part because many of those "commuter towns" were as dependent on the core city for those non-basic functions (employment most notably) as the closer-in places you call "suburbs" prior to the relocation of major employment centers out of the core city. I think the more noteworthy distinction might be that of the "satellite city" or "Edge City" -- the former being an independent urban center, like Newark, N.J. or Chester, Pa., where I work, that has been engulfed by the expanding commutershed of an adjacent larger city (New York and Philadelphia respectively), and the latter a new urban center formed amidst what had been bedroom communities of that larger city. To go back to Westchester, White Plains is a satellite city, and so is Rye to a lesser extent. Huh? By the definition you're stating here, if a city has great restaurants in the suburbs, then it automatically is NOT a "great restaurant city". And I couldn't disagree more. People in many suburbs of Chicago can find great restaurant experiences in the suburbs, where there are quite a few R4 good restaurants. (Sure, many go into the city too, but many others don't.) We have some world-class restaurants in our suburbs, and have for a long time, going back at least to when Jean Banchet first opened Le Francais in Wheeling in the early 1970s. ← I'm not sure that slkinsey's statement here is totally accurate either. Most US cities that I have heard called "great restaurant cities" also have at least one (edited to add: and usually several) restaurants of an "R3" or higher level located outside the core city. The ne plus ultra of fine dining in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, is located in Napa County, outside the usual Bay Area commutershed. The two best Japanese restaurants in the Philadelphia area are in the South Jersey suburbs and have been for years. I'm sure there are similar examples in the New York region; it's just that there are so many R4 restaurants in Manhattan alone that the ones in the outlying areas don't make it onto the radar screen. But his point about overall restaurant density holds, IMO. The bigger a circle you have to draw from the core city center to get a list of "50 Great Restaurants," the less likely your city is to make it onto the list of "great restaurant cities."

the steven starr element in the philly dining scene is fascinating to me. in the year i've been here almost everyone i've talked to has a subtle disliking of the starr restaurants. i can only attribute it to their one common quality- mega trendiness. steven starr's restaurants are all about "chicks and vokka"- that is an actual quote from him. all of his restaurants are very very popular though and i am totally convinced that the dining landscape in philadelphia is far better because of the steven starr restaurants I'm not surprised to hear that at all. However, when Striped Bass landed in his lap, he did manage to refresh that place without glitzing it up, and gimmicks like the $100 cheesesteak aside, Barclay Prime is also relatively restrained. As I've said elsewhere, Steven Starr is the man who put the theater into fine dining in Philadelphia. His theatricality and humor -- I actually burst out laughing when I saw the dessert menu at Jones, and of course I ordered the item that produced the laughter -- are something that set him apart from the crowd. You can overdose on it, and I think that undercurrent you detect comes from that, but it adds a different sort of vitality to the city's restaurant -- and social -- scene. i disagree. outside of nyc, aren't most cities' ethnic restaurants less-than-fine dining? a restaurant doesn't seem mexican, thai, indian, ethiopian, etc if it is fine dining. i've lived in detroit, san francisco, and philadelphia, and the vast majority of ethnic restaurants i visited were not fine dining (actually i can't think of any) you should try eating ethnic food in philly- (aside from italian of course) what little selection there is does not compare to places like new seoul garden, pita cafe, passage to india, and the blue nile (sorry philadelphians). I'm not sure you've eaten at enough ethnic places in this city yet. More below. One thing I've noticed about Philadelphia in the quarter-century I've lived here is that that statement -- "everyone knows everyone else" -- applies across the board, no matter what community or sub-community you're talking about. It gives this city a weirdly small-town feel, but it does help promote the various communities, as you have discovered. Sure most. All I said was I think Detroit would have a better argument if it also had several examples of ethnic restaurants with greater ambition. You brought up Stephen Starr -- just looking at his restaurants, I see Cuban, Mexican, pan-Asian, Japanese, tapas, in addition to more conventional themes. I can only speak anecdotally. When I visited San Francisco, my friends took me to a Thai restaurant -- I didn't research or choose the place, and it's not like they were trying to wow or impress me -- it was just dinner out, and it was just in a different league than anything I've had in Detroit. One thing I'm trying to convey is that I don't think it's enough to serve the usual suspects (pad thai) in a nice-ish room (Rexy's Bangkok Cuisine comes to mind.) Or take Mexican -- when I visited Denver a couple years ago, I happened to have lunch at Tamayo. I didn't even think it was that great, but I'm not aware of anybody in the Detroit area attempting something like this. Or, if I want chicken mole, a hackneyed dish anywhere else, where can I go (in the suburbs)? As far as I know, I either get a chicken mole burrito at Qdoba or drive to Canton to Mexican Fiesta II, which is no great shakes and far too far to drive for such a common dish. (Somebody please help me here.)[...] ← Sometimes the same restauateur offers a "downscale" and "upscale" version of the same experience in this city. For instance, Tierra Colombiana up in the "Zona del Oro" -- the Puerto Rican/Latino neighborhood centered on upper North Fifth Street -- is generally regarded as serving some of the best Cuban/Central/Latin American fare in Philly. For those unwilling to brave the wilds of West Kensington, the same folks serve similar fare in a classier environment at Mixto on Pine Street near 12th in Center City. Which brings me to my quibble with san. Besides those upscale Steven Starr interpretations of ethnic fare, there are loads of other good ethnic eateries here, some of which have been discussed (to death, even) on the Pennsylvania board: Szechuan Tasty House, Rangoon, Kabul, Cafe de Laos, a whole bunch of pho shops along Washington Avenue, Ba Le (bakery with excellent banh mi ["Vietnamese hoagies"]), Plaza Garibaldi, Taquitos del Pueblo, Fatou & Fama (West African), Vietnam, Dahlak, Sabor Latino, the aforementioned Tierra Colombiana, Picanha Grill, Jamaican Jerk Hut...the list goes on and on. I don't think you've even scratched the surface of ethnic dining in Philadelphia yet. (emphasis added) Okay, folks, there's solid evidence that Kansas City has become a restaurant city. When the folks in the established dining capitals pay attention, you've risen to a different level. I agree with your statement about "typecasting," but it seems to me that barbecue is KC's entree to a higher level of dining -- like cheesesteaks here, it is an Everyman food tradition that has become the point of departure for bigger and better things, and without that base, those better things might not have caught on. Some other member has a Ferran Adria quote in his .sig to the effect that "A very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster." What I'm suggesting here is that Kansas Citians' experience with barbecue, and Philadelphians' with sandwiches, gave those cities' residents an understanding of what constitutes excellence in food in at least one category. Having developed it there, the skills could easily be translated to other culinary areas. Rye not a suburb? News to me. It's in Westchester County, right over the line from the Bronx. Now New Haven, Connecticut, on the other hand...or for that matter, Trenton, N.J..... Your other comments here are spot on. There are always outliers, though, and Kansas City may be one of those exceptions that proves the rule. I await tomorrow's New York Times with bated breath.

Personally, I think that DiNic's fine roast pork sandwich would be that much better with broccoli rabe in place of the spinach, but as it is, it's a damn good sandwich, and service is top-notch. I would hope that there would be room for both DiNic's and Tony Luke's to prosper serving everything they're famous for -- after all, there does seem to be enough traffic to keep both Salumeria and Carmen's busy making hoagies -- but if I were in the mood for a roast pork sandwich at the RTM, I'd go to DiNic's first on principle too.

← Thanks for posting the Evening Bulletin link, Holly. That paper's story offers a level of detail and context that has been missing from the reporting in the press up to this point. What I pick up from it is that while Rick Oliveri was probably a good choice as an advocate for the merchants' interests in some ways, he was also a statistical outlier in others if my assessment of Merchants' Association Interim President Michael Holahan's quote is accurate. Another passage in the article hints at another bone of contention, one alluded to in the earlier Inquirer story but not expressed as directly -- or in as opinionated a fashion: That parenthetical phrase is something Paul Steinke has been fighting hard to change since taking the helm there, largely with success. I don't think that statement is accurate anymore, either, unless you are talking only about the restaurants -- and frankly, there's no good reason most of those should stay open right up to the present closing time, as the hour from 5 to 6 p.m. is really too early for the Center City dinner trade and the commuters headed home aren't interested in picking up something to eat before catching the train. I also interpret this sentence as written as suggesting something that I think would benefit the RTM in the long term but AFAIK is not on the table at all right now, and that's extending the daily hours of operation past 6 p.m. The resident population in the vicinity is IMO large enough that the RTM's fresh food vendors could capture a share of the traffic that I see lining up in the express lane at the 10th and South Super Fresh at 6:15 pm, and that population continues to rise. I can tell you that I would be one happy customer if, instead of having to route my trip home via Upper Darby to pick up some item of produce for that night's dinner, I could just take the steps up from Market East and do it at the RTM, and I'm sure I'm not alone. But if even Sunday hours -- which, it appears to me, cannot be considered anything other than a success, as they have attracted new business to the RTM rather than spread out existing traffic -- remain something "tentative" and "experimental" nine months out, then there is evidently some work to be done -- and if they remain tentative because Oliveri was being obstinate (something I cannot say he has been, for I do not know the intimate details of discussions), then while the action taken is unfair to Rick, it might be understandable in terms of "eliminating a roadblock." (The Amish are not a roadblock to permanent Sunday hours because it's been made clear that they will not be required to keep them.) Not knowing what the interests are of the city's and the PCCA's representatives on the RTM board, I'm not going to speculate on what moved them to act as they did, but it does seem to me that at heart, the issue is the whole approach that I have characterized before as "mall management." It's clearly not the way the RTM had been run prior to the PCCA's acquisition of the place -- and as it had already made significant strides from its nadir at the time of the purchase, one could legitimately question whether such a departure from tradition was needed. And this being Philadelphia, where so many people are slaves to the past^W^W^W^W^Wrevere tradition, it was being questioned, apparently pointedly by at least one person.

I was about to get medieval on your argument until I got to the last paragraph, which I'm afraid I cannot argue with. I cannot think of a single US city that outsiders would call a "restaurant city" that has only a great common-fare scene and not a great fine- (or finer-)dining scene. As I said about Philly, I think on this discussion, nobody would be calling this city a restaurant town if all we offered were cheesesteaks, hoagies, banh mi, pho and taquerias, fine examples though they are of outstanding street food. As has been noted already, both of these are Italian. When Olive Gardens are everywhere, Italian no longer qualifies as "ethnic." Tex-Mex has also crossed this border, even though there is no such thing as really good Tex-Mex outside Texas. Well, this does prove that either (1) Detroit has enough people who care about eating well to become a "restaurant city" if the planets align or (2) like so much else about Detroit, it is so anomalous that it attracts the curiosity of non-Detroiters. Indianapolis and Kansas City (1.9 million) are roughly comparable in size. One swallow does not a summer make, but the one non-barbecue meal I ate out on my trip back for my 30th high school reunion, the catered fare at the reunion itself (from a highly regarded local restaurant whose chef is a close friend of a classmate who runs a catering and event-planning business), and the presence of frequent, knowledgeable discussions of Kansas City restaurants on this forum suggest to me, again as I've said upthread, that it has become a "restaurant city," albeit one of a regional rather than a national stature. Oh, and one more piece of evidence in this regard: There is a running "Kansas City Food Media Digest" topic in this forum. I see no such animal pertaining to Detroit. That alone tells me something. It says at the minimum, as you note above, that there is an insufficient amount of writing devoted to the appreciation of really, really, really good food, or even really, really good food, in Detroit, and as has been suggested here also, media attention can serve as a proxy for public interest. I can't think of a "great restaurant city" that doesn't have lively, or at least extensive, reporting on food and dining in its news media. P.S. If you want to see what the Kansas City eGers did to accommodate me on my first trip back home in almost 20 years, read this topic.

Grandma Utz's would probably go well with a double bock like the Clipper City Hang Ten Weizen that nearly put me away at the Grey Lodge this past Friday the Firkenteenth. Yuengling Lager will do in a pinch, and you can get that absolutely everywhere in this area. You're on! I'd be happy to treat you to a bag and a brew.

And the least expensive to boot! A fascinating piece, and after reading it, it seems that beef is like so many other foodstuffs we buy: In order to achieve consistency, we have bred flavor out of the product. I found the cheese analogy apt in the Slate article, for I have become quite familiar with the variations in flavor you get when you produce foods according to the dictates of nature rather than industry via a Cheddar-style cheese produced in Lancaster County (which, if you haven't figured this out yet, is the fount of all that is right and good about Pennsylvania agriculture) from milk from grass-fed cows. The winter variety is noticeably different from the summer variety (it's sweeter). The Slate article noted that some producers of strictly grass-fed beef refused to provide steaks for their taste test because they could not guarantee consistency. I think it would require a major educational effort to get millions of consumers to expect inconsistency when buying meat in order to get better tasting steaks. Not to mention that the consumers would then need a bunch of information at the store to make their choice (the labels would have to display where the beef was raised, how long the cattle were fed where, and what they ate). Something tells me that many consumers just don't want to put in that level of effort in order to pick a steak -- or a lot of other foods, for that matter.

Even though every national cuisine is in some sense a product of "fusion" -- tomatoes, which we so often associate with Italian dishes, are native to the New World, not Europe, and pasta, also strongly identified with that cuisine, was a Chinese import, for instance -- the whole uprootedness, the very transplantedness, of American culture means that it's far easier for us to blend established and wildly disparate traditions to produce something completely different and possibly unrecognizable to the members of the tribes we borrowed the various elements from. Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world don't venture all that far from where they grew up over the course of their lifetimes. By the act of coming to America, the immigrants all of us save the Native Americans descended from immediately set themselves apart (or were set apart by others, in some cases) from most of the world. That alone should make it difficult for people to maintain "home" the way it was, or even the way they remember it. But one of the things has changed since Gourmet instructed its readers only in how to acquire the trappings and behaviors of the good life is that we no longer desire to completely forget those old "home" ways. From soul food to White Trash Cooking, we have come to appreciate anew the common, or peasant, or folk foods that our parents sought to put behind them in some way in the 1950s. Many of the recipes in Gourmet today probably never would have made it into its pages back in the old days because they are more closely tied to these no-longer-disreputable traditions, even if they only barely allude to them because of significant differences in ingredients, preparation or presentation. And, as you pointed out, Karen, we--or at least some of us, including much of Gourmet's contemporary readership--are far more conscious of where our food comes from and how it makes it onto our plate; we want the kind of explanation, investigation, and even advocacy contained in stories like "A View to a Kill." (Having read it now, I can only ask, Why aren't more American poultry producers opting to asphyxiate chickens instead? I must admit that reading the piece left me with the same queasiness I would experience in a detailed explanation of methods of executing people, but since we can't eat live animals of any kind, and pace the fervent hopes of PETA, we aren't about to give up eating dead ones completely, we have to go there in order to understand the issue.) That New York Times link you posted, Karen, raises all sorts of questions that are way beyond the scope of both this discussion and this board. I hope they get raised more widely and more insistently in the national press.

(emphasis added) I wonder whether that is truly the case, as "Certified Angus" beef seems to be spreading throughout supermarket meat cases here on the East Coast. Of course, it's not necessary for the majority of supermarket shoppers to buy a more expensive product in order for it to be worthwhile for the store to carry it; the higher margins on the pricier stuff means the store doesn't need to sell as much of it to come out ahead. So a majority of consumers may still buy the doctored USDA Select beef while enough buy the Angus to keep it on the shelves. Given that there's now Angus beef where there wasn't before, I'd consider that an improvement for the supermarket. Still, there's room for confusion even here, as the folks who are promoting the "Certified Angus Beef" brand won't sell to all the supermarket chains in a given market. (I suspect that they probably go into exclusive deals with just one area chain.) That means that rivals would have to introduce their own premium line to compete. But how do I know what breed of cattle go into the "Lancaster Brand Steakhouse Choice" that Acme sells in answer to the "Certified Angus" at the Super Fresh? (Edited to add historical trivia: "Lancaster Brand" meats have been sold at Acme stores since 1927; the company claims it's the oldest branded line of meats in the country. As far as I know, very little of the beef Acme sells, if any, is raised, butchered or packaged in Lancaster County.) Better to patronize a butcher you trust still.

Hey, this is off to a promising start, and congratulations on your new digs! Neat features in your kitchen, and I trust you will clutter up that fridge soon enough. Since you're also a fashion designer, can I ask what the significance is of the jeans pocket that is your avatar? Hankies in pockets? I'm not going there. No siree.

There's no doubt that the hamburger as we now know it is an American original, but its name comes from a German city and its culinary DNA can probably be traced to that city as well.

One more bit of wordplay: There was a clever print ad about 15 years or so ago for this cordial, featuring several smiling faces and one grimacing one. The headline read: "9 out of 10,000 Americans Prefer Campari." Cheers! And once again, thanks for a wonderful blog with a lot of soul.

Don't credit me. Credit George Bernard Shaw, who used the phrase to describe a second marriage!

"Sysco shops"? Does Sysco directly operate restaurants as well as supply them? Or does it run an operation that provides all-but-finished portion-controlled dishes? Now I'm curious.