Wilfrid

This thread is revealing my bad memory for bar names, but what about that bare, charmless bar on East Broadway - only bar around - with a really chirpy, neon martini-glass sign outside, misleadingly suggesting that good times await within.

Push 'em through a sieve three times.

Yes, merit is not to be entirely discounted. If a group of people have become habituated to eating an extremely poor diet through scarcity, it would be presumptuous to suggest they couldn't do better (although equally absurd to suggest that they would adopt haute cuisine with glee). Case by case, I suggest, and I think the Italians are eating pasta because they like it.

Doesn't "Pasta Hater" over-state it? Rice and beans doesn't form part of everyday eating in most countries, but I don't think it means the majority are "Rice and Beans Haters". And no, not merit - custom and habituation are key factors in food preferences.

Yes, lxt, I was thinking of Sondheim, but Stravinsky will do. Thanks for these posts which are very interesting and constructive. Steve - did you post comments on your dinner at L'Ambroisie - from a previous trip, I presume?

Hard as marble. I could only break them with a cleaver. Hence the shatter and spray effect. They were cute though. I will use them as a centerpiece next time.

Reminded me of a pub in Cheltenham - a rather chilling National Front pub, as far as I could make out - where on Sunday lunchtime you got a raffle ticket with your first drink, which turned out to be for a raffle of pork chops and similar items. So the clients would come in there for a bevy hoping to win their Sunday lunch.

Much improved signature, Adam - and , yes, this all sounds a little familiar. The notion that every national cuisine should aspire to be the same as, or very similar to, French haute cuisine, can be defended only by applying criteria derived from French haute cuisine to assess cuisines which don't have that aspiration. It's circular and a little silly. I can understand someone using France as a yardstick to measure the achievements of "haute" gastronomy in Italy (or Britain) - because France is where that kind of approach to food, and to thinking about food, originated and was codified. But to compare a foreign national cuisine generally with French cuisine, let alone French haute cuisine is, er, apples and oranges, to coin a phrase. It rests on the idea, at which I continue to scoff, that the Italians would give up pasta and the British would give up pies only if they had more exposure to pureed veloute of something very soft.

me neither

Oh, so some of the bigger-than-a-baseball ones are "ornamental"? I had worked that out by the time I was standing, quivering and bleeding, among the ruins. Beloved and Munchkin were out, fortunately, but I was able to show them the patch of missing skin on my left hand when they got home. All very comical. Humph.

I must put "eat at a restaurant in New Jersey" on my "to do" list.

Yvonne, were you eating from the full Jean-Georges menu in Nougatine. It sounds like it. Did you have to make a special request for that? I am assuming Nougatine has its own, less pricy menu. Gives me an idea for a thread (receding footsteps...)

Similarly, it would be good to hear if anyone's been to RM.

[you were never asked ] me neither

1. This thread is worth it just for some of the names. I mean, The Golden Banana. Poetry. 2. Gavin, yes the Grave Maurice is a cut above a dive. I have many personal memories of that pub, some of which are too personal for a Wednesday morning. But I spent a lot of time in there, munching scotch eggs and drinking strong lager. There are some far divier bars on that stretch of the Whitechapel Road. What about that Young's pub on the corner - the Bull's Head, maybe? McEwen and Tartan on tap, and a clientele of, er, lost celts. And if you ventured into the back streets behind the Whitechapel hospital, there were some pubs serving the substantial local dosshouse population. Maybe they've been cleaned up by now. Iain Sinclair memorably evokes one of them in Downriver (which I'm sure you know). 3. Trying to think of a very garish and grubby bar in San Francisco's Chinatown. It's a very large, high ceiling roomed, with various brightly coloured Buddhas on the shelves, serving mainly neat brandies to the local crowd, and with some fearsomely dirty restrooms downstairs. Anyone remember the name? I think it's quite notorious.

Okay, Liza and Cathy, very funny. Those cute little squash are absolutely inedible, aren't they. First off, you can't cut them open. Cleavers, kitchen knives, axes, whatever. You have to take your life in your hands, and then they shatter and spray all over the room. Next, the interiors consist entirely of seeds. Seeds in such numbers, Kurt Godel wouldn't be able to keep count. When you finally gather some seedless scraps and roast them in the oven, the skin remains absolutely hard as marble - totally rock solid. And you end up with about two and a half grams of edible flesh from about a pound of squash. I think you both owe me dinner. Nice green salad last night, then.

Okay, if I can get my hand around 'em, I nix 'em. Got it.

What would your diary look like if you were trying to be extravagant?

Where is it? Is it in the neighborhood around the old city square - as I vaguely remember it?

Not necessary to douse them with oil, then? I might try this tonight.

Stand Up Frank's is a good name for a dive. And yes, researchgal, there should be people in there who have been drinking since morning - possibly several days ago. Most of the famous "dives" in New Orleans seemed to have got cleaned up, but Bourdain spoke very highly of one while picking at his chopped liver at Sammy's - can't remember the name now.

Ah bin drivin' all night, my hands wet on the whee-el

No, this is for global divedom, so no diminishing, please, Priscilla. What does make up a dive? I agree, they aren't necessarily dirty, let alone dangerous. I think they have to be reasonably dark and dingy. Also, I think what's important is a kind of sense of that time has stopped passing, and people have stopped bothering - maybe what used to be meant by "beat" (in the literary sense). A dive is where they don't take down the Xmas decorations in January, because they'll be good to go next December. It's where they don't redecorate. It's where they never change the draft beers, or offer interesting new menu options (dives usually have no food, or just really hopeless stuff like pretzels or pickled eggs). I think dives do have to cater for very drunk patrons - not necessarily rolling drunk - quietly, chronically pickled imbibers will do. What's that place near Bloomingdale's? The Subway Inn, I think. Painted by Ed Hopper. That's a dive. And let's not forget the old Siberia, a sort of dark, concrete cavern, with broken furniture, just off the steps down to a midtown subway station. That was a mess. Sorry, those were New York. London? The King's Head, Chinatown. Upstairs or downstairs.

None of my favorite bartenders are called Johnny.

Oh, I have some. In San Francisco's "tenderloin", where I could see from the doorway that most patrons were unable to stand. And a bar in Harlem, the name of which was written on a piece of torn corrugated cardboard taped to the window. Funnily enough, the name hasn't stuck in my memory. I too am profoundly fond of dives, tommy, which is why I hoped someone else would show up on the thread and tell me about some I don't know.