MarketStEl

Do you know of a few URLs you can share off the top of your head? Or should I just Google "alcohol addiction" and wade through the n-hundred-thousand-odd hits I will get in return? --Sandy, curious to see where he rates now

Hey! There's a lot on this menu that I'd consider "authentically Southern" too, or authentically Southern with a twist. Grilled pork chop with collards and mac 'n' cheese? Fried catfish and hush puppies? Salmon croquettes? Okra pancakes with cucumber salad and yellow squash? (There's your twist.) Looks to me like you went to the wrong Southern eatery the first time around. (In light of that recent Daily Gullet feature on the (lack of) distinction between "Southern cooking" and "soul food," I should note that about 70% of the items on the list of dishes I plucked out of the menu would qualify as "soul food" as well.)

1) I thought Frank's RedHot! Sauce was a cayenne pepper sauce. 2) You do know that Frank's now makes a RedHot! Buffalo Wing Sauce. You don't even have to add the butter yourself any more.

This one I know: Chick-fil-A! The company's owners are devout Christians and follow the biblical injunction about resting on the seventh day.

I probably would have gone to the BMW dealer and asked where they kept the Minis. Back to the food, though: Oh, dear--this was looking so promising! All the right visual cues and atmospheric vibe, but then this: Want me to have a slab of ribs shipped to you from Gates'?

It's not Eastern. It's Western. If you go to a *civilized* place in PA, the only acceptable condiments for potatoes are butter and salt (baked potato), ketchup OR vinegar (french fries) or none (potato chips). Potato chips may come in salted, sour cream and onion, barbecue, or salt and vinegar flavors, all of which are vaguely heretical except plain salted. Other flavors you see made by a PA potato chip company are made for sale to non-natives. You mean like Utz Carolina Style Bar-B-Q Chips? Or Herr's chips with Old Bay seasoning, and Utz' similar "Crab Chip"? As for barbecue flavored potato chips being vaguely heretical: Maybe in this part of the country (where I live now), but not in the Barbecue Capital of America (where I grew up). You just don't serve barbecue flavored chips and barbecue in the same place at the same time. As I believe I said upthread, it's mayo on burgers that I found strange. I've run into these much more often in the East than I did in the Midwest, though apparently I was wrong about no place within 150 miles of that Overland Park Burger King serving them. I've ordered more than a few cheesesteaks, mushroom wit, in my time here, though my first preference is for cheesesteak, witout. I guess the difference between Philly and LA is that in Philly, you have to ask for the 'shrooms, while in LA, they assume you want them. You do need to educate those Angelenos that the cheesesteak is at its base a simple sandwich: meat and cheese, nothing more, and you build up from there. But you are right about this: Cheesesteaks do not come with mayo.

It seems like the disgust is more about it being from KFC than the fact that it's layered food. Hell, seems like plenty of things are layered - so the hate must be coming from somewhere else. I truly think KFC missed the boat by not including biscuits somewhere in the layering. In fact, I plan on making a thanksgiving bowl filled turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stuffing, etc this year. What's so objectionable about that? ← I think part of the problem can be found by asking the following question: How many of you out there have ever made shepherd's pie with leftover fried chicken and grated cheese? IOW, it's not the concept per se, it's the ingredients. As for "orange salt": I'll wager that the poster was referring to seasoned salt. The combination of spices found in most seasoned salt produces an orange, or more accurately reddish-orange, mix.

As the city's rather successful tourism-promotion campaign slogan says, "What happens here, stays here." I thought that was Branson, Mo. Oh, wait--those are country musicians. And Branson hasn't yet advanced past the $7.99 all-you-can-eat buffet stage; Las Vegas has evolved well beyond that. Atlantic City is just beginning to head in Vegas' direction, but its evolution may be retarded by the fact that there are just too many low rollers living within an easy drive (or bus ride, with complimentary roll of quarters to get you started at the slots) of the place. Agreed.

Did you really mean to use that word? --Sandy, being perhaps a bit too nit-picky here

And I'm sure a number of people here at eG have the condition that's caused by joint deposition of this substance, as the term "gluttony" is almost synonymous with it. [edit to add a word] ← Fat? Gluten? (playing on homophony)

And all these years I thought "Super Colon Blow" was a parody*. But thanks for reminding me that maybe I should start eating Kashi GoLean Crunch!--a high-fiber** cereal I really like and which would go well with my exercise regimen--again. *Edited to add: The City of Philadelphia is currently running an ad campaign reminding residents what items they should recycle and what they shouldn't. (A radio ad features two women talking about "recycling your mail," and one of them agrees that she should dispose of her no-good boyfriend.) One of the ads in the subway reminds you to recycle cardboard boxes and features a fictitious cereal whose label reads "One Bowl and You'll Feel ... BRAN Tastic." Since the product is described on the label as "Semi-crunchy flakes of bran with rock-hard raisins," I don't think I'm going to look for this stuff at my local supermarket anytime soon. **Relatively speaking. With a mere 8g of fiber, it doesn't even hold a candle to this stuff.

I see I changed my .sig quote just a bit too soon. (It had been a quote from Jane Jacobs, recounted in her obituary: "The most awful thing is when you go to a city and it's like 12 others you've seen.") For better or worse, no one can say that about Las Vegas. It is to urbanism what hip-hop is to music. It serves up recognizable samples of other cities as part of a larger fantasy. It should be only natural, then, that the city extended this practice to other cities' fancy restaurants--and that chefs in those cities willingly played along.

I was seeing a therapist for depression when I quit--on my therapist's advice. (I still remember exactly what he said to me: "Before we see whether you need antidepressants, let's take you off the depressant you're taking and see what happens." As my therapist was a Penn psychiatrist, and Penn is the High Church of Cognitive Therapy, there's a chance I might not have gone on antidepressants anyway had quitting not produced the desired result. But it did, and I'm thankful for that.) I guess you could say that I too was replicating my father's life in going down this path, for after my parents divorced, my Dad--though I didn't realize this at the time--began a long, slow descent into severe depression, which grew worse after he retired from the Post Office and withdrew from everyday social life. The last time I saw him alive--at a memorial service for my mother, whom he never stopped loving--he lit up the room with his presence. The very next day, it was back in the black hole. He died just about a year to the day after Mom did, and while it wasn't listed on the death certificate, I'm sure his depression hastened his demise. Whatever else I may have been thinking when I started seeing my therapist, I knew I didn't want to go down that same path. That probably helped me to quit--though I did quit smoking just as abruptly some 15 years earlier. But there is a difference between alcohol and cigarettes: Used in moderation, alcohol is good for you. It is also a useful social lubricant (and a door to understanding, as that well-known Latin motto suggests). Given this, it seemed to me--somewhere around my 20th month of sobriety--that if I understood my limits, there would be little harm in having a drink every so often. So far, that has been the case. What I see in your story, Chris, is a similar understanding. Again, congrats on not totally following in your grandfather's footsteps.

Re: the new Giunta's butcher stand: --Are either Charlie or Martin related to the Giunta who has the butcher shop on 9th Street that specializes in more exotic meats? (I believe that place is run by someone named Giunta.) --What, pray tell, is the difference between "prime meats" and "USDA prime meats"? Wouldn't the former have to meet the standards required to obtain the USDA grade?

All in the family, eh, Chris? On more than one occasion, I've said to my partner that we were replicating our respective parents' marriages with our own relationship. Where I had expected to read a story about grappling with addiction, which is what your lead set me up for, instead I get a wonderful piece in which you replicate your grandfather's relationship to alcohol--a pleasure made guilty only by the idea that someone is watching over your shoulder. Of course, no one replicates their ancestors perfectly, and neither do you. You do not hide your pleasure, but rather raise it to a quasi-religious exercise. Given your granddad's approach, and your own throttling back when you realized you were drinking too much, I'd be curious to know how you came to turn alcohol from a habit to a practice. As a heavy boozer-turned-teetotaler-turned-social drinker, I took no little pleasure in reading a tale of a similar journey, with a twist--and a little Pernod in place of the right ingredient. A toast to you, Sir.

I wouldn't say it was hacked to bits. I lost 400 words out of a piece that was orginally 3500, and I was the one who did the cutting. The reference to Matsuhisa aside, I lost nothing important. A modest tightening can only improve a piece like that; I'm a big believer in editing, something old media (when it's doing the job correctly) still has over the new. So no. I'll stick by the one that's online on the Observer site. ← Samuel Johnson (so I've heard) once began a letter, "Please forgive the length of this letter; I didn't have the time to write a shorter one." Every good writer benefits from a good editor--and if time permits, it's also good to let a piece marinate for a little while, then return to it and reread it. (Of course, in the daily newspaper trade, there's almost no time to do this, so the cutting is done on the fly. That is why the "inverted pyramid" style of news writing evolved: it made stories easier to edit quickly, as you only needed to cut from the end of the story if it was too long.)

These remind me of a Hostess snack cake from the 1960s called Sno-Balls. They were chocolate cake wrapped in a vanilla-and-coconut frosting. But I'm sure that these are not those. So what are they? BTW: Chain trivia questions! Cool.

Oops! Didn't get to the end of the discussion prior to my last post. Bringing things back to the original question by way of SuzySushi's refocusing of her original question: I think the cleanliness question is also a function of product turnover, and maybe even of the owner's priorities. Several posters have already noted that "Western" food markets in non-Western countries share many of the attributes that you find unpleasant at the "ethnic" markets you sometimes patronize in Hawai'i. They have suggested that in both cases, the dirtiness stems in part from the difficulty of getting the products from the places they were made to the store shelves. I used to patronize a small corner convenience grocery store in Center City Philadelphia of the "American" variety--that is, one that stocked a small selection of packaged foods and (as is common for stores of this type in Philly) had a deli counter where one could buy lunch meats and hoagies. This store also had a license to sell take-out beer, which Pennsylvania law allows only taverns and stores that sell prepared foods to take out to do. It was clear from walking into the store--which in its later years under its old owners did not open until noon--what the store's main product line was, for the boxes of Hamburger Helper and Jell-O and Jiffy corn muffin mix and cans of Green Giant veggies and... all had a fine coating of dust on them and the deli case's contents looked more like those of my refrigerator than those of a decent deli counter. I don't think I ever saw anyone walk out of there with a hoagie, and very few people walk out with food items other than chips or salty snacks, but there were certainly lots of people walking out with six-packs or forties. I think L&I (the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, which regulates food vendors, among other things) must have sat on them for something, because just before the store was sold to a Korean owner, the dusty boxes disappeared from the shelves and the grungy frozen-food case was replaced by a seating area with beer taps. The store's new Korean owners have replaced all the fixtures, spruced up the seating area, and put in a real deli counter. And they keep more traditional convenience-store hours. And there's no dust on the packages. I guess I went into all of this by way of saying that I agree that product turnover has something to do with it. I'll wager that if a typical supermarket sold as few food products as this store did, you'd find more dusty merchandise there as well. Dusty cans don't faze me, really, because I realize the dust can't get inside the can. What I do find somewhat unsettling are the more pronounced aromas of live animals I've sometimes encountered in the local Asian supermarkets, in particular the smells of fish that pervade their fish counters. I posted about the H-Mart chain of Asian supermarkets before, including on my foodblog. It struck me that besides their mix of Asian and Western products, another distinguishing feature of this chain is that its stores are maintained to American supermarket standards of cleanliness and lack of odor. There's a decent amount of live and non-frozen seafood at their seafood counter (which in the Upper Darby store is right behind the produce section, a rather atypical arrangement by American standards), but you don't smell any of it.

You are familiar with the US term "Oreo," no? (That is, when not used to describe a chocolate cream sandwich cookie?) --Sandy, who's been called that--sometimes affectionately--on numerous occasions

I would be confused by this. I understand why this is done--classified advertising is priced by the line, and any shorthand that gets the line count down saves the advertiser money--but I would at least put a K after the number to clue the reader in that he wasn't getting a ramshackle shack (which even then would probably fetch a price higher than $561). Yes, maybe people ought to be smart enough to infer by its mere placement at the end of a menu description that an unadorned number is a price, but I see no reason not to add the visual cue of the dollar sign, at least for the first entry in the list. Now if a restaurant had menu copy where the price was printed as "$25 dollars"--which I have seen in print--that would drive me up a wall.

Waitstaff at the late, unlamented Philadelphia outpost of Hamburger Mary's used to present the check in a huge plastic high-heel pump. It was a nice touch, and the High Fifties decor went right along with the campy theme. Pity that the service was haphazard and the food only so-so; the owners--nice guys though they were--weren't up to the challenge of operating a restaurant, especially one that was aimed at a gay/straight clientele but away from the main gay neighborhood yet surrounded by lots of businessfolk they could have made regular patrons out of anyway.

I've noticed decals from the Hilton organization on the doors of two restaurants near me, which baffles me a bit because AFAIK Hilton owns no freestanding restaurants, but the quips on the signs seem very appropriate here: "People like being let in." (on the door of Lula) "Hello there. Now you try." (on the door of More Than Just Ice Cream) The staff at both of these establishments score well on the making-one-feel-welcome scale.

Yes, I'd like to know that, too. I first heard it used like that on the West Coast. ← Maybe it's similar to the process by which a word meaning "a bundle of sticks" (or, in the UK, "a cigarette") came to be a derogatory slur for "homosexual"?

Wasn't it Voltaire who wrote, "The law, in its infinite majesty, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and beg for food"? Then I see this quote in Mr. Rayner's fascinating article: and I think, Hmmmm...the rich aren't that different from you and I. They just pretend to be more adventurous, but they're really just as lazy as we are and don't want to venture outside their comfort zones either. Of course, when I see a Wolfgang Puck To Go refrigerated sandwich case next to my departure gate in the Southwest Airlines section of Kansas City International Airport, I guess it had to be just a matter of time before the Big Name Chefs figured out they could do the same thing at the very top end of the scale. --Sandy, wondering why that case wasn't a Gates BBQ To Go instead

Eastern? Eastern? Listen, I grew up on the east coast, and I also worked at a hot dog stand in high school (impressive, yes?); I never saw anyone put mayo on hot dogs until I moved to Detroit and hosted visitors from Ohio. I just figured it was part of the whole white gravy phenomenon. Actually, I had hamburgers in mind when I first wrote of this "Eastern" habit--although I was exposed to mayo on a burger when I ate my first Whopper at a Burger King in Overland Park, Kan., at about age 13, no other burger joint within a 150-mile radius served burgers topped with mayo. I didn't think anyone, anywhere put mayo on hot dogs. They gotta keep up those clean-scrubbed Mormon habits, I guess. That sounds like a very appropriate add-in. I'll have to try it with my next order of fries.