Busboy

Largely looking for a place to kick back with an old friend whose path I will cross as we travel from and to different places on the same weekend. Food quality is important, but not as important as the ability to kick back for an hour and a half without some frantic waiter trying to get us out so they can seat the next table. When I thought I was going to be in town on Saturday, I thought the front room of the Grammercy Tavern would be perfect, if towards the upper edge of the budget. But we are happy to eat any food other than Pizza (I'm planning a stop in New Haven later in the day for that). Funky, weird, off-the-beaten-track places especially welcome. All suggestions appreciated

Maryland just got its official dessert last week. Looks good.

I don't think the servers themselves should be cleaning the tables. I notice in some restaurants they have different set of people cleaning the tables, who never touch the food on the way out of the kitchen. Servers should bring the food out from the kitchen; there should be busboys or whatever you call them to bring the dishes back to the kitchen. ← I don't think this is necessarily reasonable or possible in some places, give the narrow profit margins of a lot of places and the fact that there's no practical hygienic reason for this. Also, does this mean that the waiter can't clear plates between courses -- that they should walk past your dirty dishes while the busboy is busy with another task? Agree that proper clearing and rimless touching is appropriate, though.

Including pictures of the two Petes. Excellent.

Nice article in the Post this morning about brunch options here. In brief... Penn Quarter: Oyamel, Poste, (they should have mentioned Cafe Atlantico, too) Logan: Morrison-Clark, Georgetown: Martins (serious old school and history: JFK proposed there, I was served my first beer there) Cleveland Park: Ardeo Not mentioned but should have been in Dupont: The Tabard Inn (call early to request the patio or one of their smaller rooms -- Charm City, for sure).

I just got an e-mail from Mike and -- and this is truly amazing, given the speed with which the DC government and restaurant contractors usually move -- Pete's is scheduled to open more or less on schedule: 11AM Monday, April 28th. I pledge a full report by midnight.

I think your geography is a bit off: even when it was open, Red Sage wasn't in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. If you're in Dupont, you might want to check in with the Tabard Inn, a consistent if not brilliant performer for many years, and possessed both of a back patio and several smaller rooms that afford charming surroundings. Also, Montsouris, if bistro fare floats your boat. I would be very leery of bringing any guest to the Hitching Post who can't sit, without a menu, for an hour, sipping a Seagram's and tonic and listening to Marvin Gaye on the juke for 45 minutes, and then decide "the heck with it" and go somewhere else. The kitchen is run by an older lady (the owner) and when she gets backed up, there's nothing you can really do or say to speed things up, and it would be rude to try. Though, if you're planning to get there early, likely worth the risk. Georgia Brown's has lost some of its luster, but remains a bastion of Southern cuisine in town.

Olive oil is a solid at refrigerator temperatures. Are you sure the commercial products you're using are olive oil, or are the something else?

Admittedly, I might have exaggerated for effect for a second -- though I wonder if you transported "French" 3-star in New York to Paris and a Parisian 3-star to New York, and let them macerate for a year or so, how each would change. My larger point was that I do think you miss much of the soul of a city if you cloister yourself in grand hotels and multi-starred restaurants; that the question "when is enough too much" is philosophical, as much as a physiological question. I see posts on eGullet -- not only about Paris, but other great cities -- that make me wonder why the poster has left themselves so little time to walk along the river and eat sandwiches at a cafe.

We've used country ham from Monovano's buddies at Calhoun's to make a Nuevo Latino version of the always-delish Cubano sandwich -- possibly the greatest sandwich ever. Our variations are: 1) Make yourself a nice pork loin for dinner, put the leftovers in the fridge until a good game or fine movie or other sandwich-worthy event comes along. Although, if you're having a sandwich-fest because you have so much ham to use up, it's worth roasting up a dedicated loin. 2) Make the sandwich according to this recipe. You may want to get your sharpest knife out and shave the ham as best you can. It's a bit of a pain but, in my experience, pre-sliced ham is thicker than you want. Pickles should be of a robust dill sort. Remember that this is not the place for your best local authentic crusty baguette. Bread should be at least somewhat squishy. 3) Ignore tradition (this is Nuevo Latino, after all ) and make yourself some mayo with lime and roast cumin. Best if you home-make it, but you can add lime and cumin to Hellman's in a pinch. 4) Serve with your favorite variation on black beans. This helps solve the salt problem, too, because though the ham is a key ingredient, there's a lot of other food going on to balance out the salt.

The New York Times weighed in this weekend. [This mention of the Hofbräuhaus reminded me of one unfortunate difference between my son's generation and mine. On my high school field trip to Europe, several of us between 16 and 18 got quite gloriously and legally hammered there with the acceptance, if not approval, of our chaperons. Indeed, we had been taught the Hofbräuhaus song by our German teacher, before departing. Skip ahead 30 years...My son had two classmates expelled for drinking legally -- but unapprovedly -- on a field trip to the Caribbean (it was actually a real trip, not a junket, despite the Caribbean destination). When did we become such tightasses?]

I'd like to throw in another thought. I've never been burdened by the ability to afford 12 stars in 4 days, which seems to bring great angst to some people (which 4? how to get reservations? What if have to eat at a place with a mediocre wine list?) - though my wife and I are saving our pennies and praying for the Euro to crash. But, in addition to the reasons cited by Dave up top, I wouldn't want to do a trip like that (and don't when I travel to NY or California) because I don't think I'm getting a real feel for the place or the food. It's running about in a rarefied and increasingly internationalized culinary ether which, while extraordinary, isn't really Paris (or New York, or San Francisco). Or rather, it's really only part of the blind men's elephant, and focusing on that denies you the simpler but equally important delights of discovering a perfectly cooked sausage at a simple cafe or picnic assembled with painstaking delight along a market street and eaten beneath the Tour Eiffel with a bottle or three of plonk. If all or most of your time is spent in starred establishments, you see restaurants but not the city itself so much, and the way the people there really live. Food becomes an end, when it is even more delightful as a means to a broader discovery. I find few things more wonderful than breakfast in a bar-tabac or an 20 minutes in line at the boulangerie. Makes me feel like I'm in France. (Not that I'm not going to hit a 3-star soon as that Euro gets back to $1.25. Two if it hits $1.10. )

agreed and also if it is raining out the tourists aren't as bad. I love to go when it is raining! ← Speaking as a tourist, y'all kin bite me -- and don't get between me and the grouper cheeks. Though, now that my buddy's sold her crib in West Seattle and moved to Longview, I guess I'll have to do my Seattle cooking on a hot plate in my hotel room. I can't give the advice that the locals can, but I can say that if I lived two blocks away I'd drop in in the morning before I headed off to work (schedule permitting). Forget the tourists, last time I shopped there there weren't even any locals, the guy laying out the grouper cheeks bragged quietly to me that the only other gent in the stall was a prominent local chef (not Tom) (this was not the fish-throwing stall, do I get local cred for that? ) and at the next place down or so I spent 10 blissful solitary minutes by myself picking through the wild chanterelles for the 30 or so I needed that were just the exact same perfect size -- first chanterelles of the fall season, they told me, and I believed 'em. If I lived two blocks from Pike Place, I'd give up morning sex for shopping. Also, I'd catch the bus to Salumi once a week, but that's a different thread.

You might try the Iron Bridge Wine Company, which didn't strike me as brilliant but was certainly tasty enough, and is actually owned by someone I knew 25 years ago in high school. It's reviews have been good enough that I don't feel too nepotistic recommending it. If the owner (Steve Wecker) is in, mentioning my name will certainly get you a grin and maybe a free club soda or something. Sadly, since my days busboying through the restaurant scene in Columbia, it seems to have been overwhelmed by the chains. My very first place of employment is now a Clyde's, for example.

And do be aware that no matter how late you work, there will be restaurants open. Depending on your own tolerance, it's easy to find dinner until well after midnight. And once you realize that they're all trying to cheat you, Athenian taxi drivers are cheap. After rush hour you can probably get to the Acropolis in 25 minutes (not that that's necessarily where you'd go to dine) for about 10 euro.

There's a huge amount of space between a waiter who can't keep his hands off of you and one who's an "uptight arse." Lots of room for competent, informal, friendly service. When I go to a restaurant, I'm looking for a professional, not a buddy. I mean sure, sometimes I get chatting with a server or a bartender -- I'm not actually unfriendly -- and some servers actually are buddies, though when I serve them at my table I try not to caress their shoulders and look meaningfully into their eyes to distract them from the overcooked steak. A little professional distance is a nice thing, false bonhomie (and even -- no one who knows me will believe this-- flirting) is annoying, especially when it's being used to as a substitute for competence or to manipulate my tip calculations.

Do not be fooled by the color. Avoid beets. All the two-year-olds on earth are right. When it comes to beets, I confess to having a taste for the recipe proposed by Boswell for use with cucumbers. "a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing." It's always seemed to me that beets were somehow invented by the old Soviet Union, using that same aesthetic sensibility that gave us Stalinist architecture and exiled Prokofiev. But I guess the farmers markets have to sell something during the lean months. The only beet recipe I ever really liked, was by Thomas Keller, who juices, reduces and strains beet to come up with gloriously ruby syrup that goes beneath butter-poached lobster and a layer of crisped potatoes. Perhaps the straining eliminates the potting soil taste.

It's different when it's someone you work with in a restaurant. Most of the workers are trying to communicate on three levels at once during a busy service and a little touch (shoulders or lower back, in my experience) tells them to get the hell out of the way while they take a drink order and you remember who gets the burger. Got fired from a restaurant in uptight New England, once, when the head waitress responded poorly to this type of communication. For friends -- I'm not much for it, either. I don't like to even air kiss unless there's a reasonable chance the person is tempted to sleep with me, and my wife keeps an eye on that type of activity, so there's very little of that. As an uptight east coast old straight guy, you have to do a certain amount of hugging just so people don't think you're an uptight straight old East Coast white guy, but there's a certain pro forma aspect to it. Servers? Unless she's also the topless dancer at the club I'm visiting or we're at the point where (s)he is bringing free drinks and I'm tipping like money grows on trees, let's just shake hands and promise to get together again real soon sometime. Bottom line: in my experience as a waiter and as a customer, people touching you are just being drama queens, and it's just a way to cover up some other shortcoming in the dinner.

Sign above the entrance at Madam's Organ: "Sorry, we're open." Next time you go to Madam's Organ -- which revels in its grungy little bar-ness -- skip the food and just knock back beer and listen to some of the best local bluegrass and blues around. It's hard to imagine anyone going there specifically for the food, though the place deos smell marginally better since the smoking ban.

Of course, if you go to Ben's, you eat with the stars.

Wouldn't Perlow be an example of an undiagnosed case of diabetes? Dude thinks he's healthy, starts feeling crummy, talks to a doctor who says "Surprise, your 400 pound self has diabetes!". How many people like that are walking around under the impression that everything is fine? ← Perlow has been diagnosed. ETA: Underdiagnosis might be asserted had Jason gone for a checkup and been told that he didn't have diabetes when in fact he did. A suspicion that a condition is underdiagnosed is just that -- a suspicion. If you prove "that it exists, you remove the underdiagnosis. The Flegal study demonstrates that diabetes was underdiagnosed in the past, but it could only do that in light of historical statistics. The Flegal study also suggests that what people are calling an epidemic is in reality a correction in observation. The same proportion of people had diabetes in 2002 as they did 14 years earlier. All that changed was that in 2002 we knew about them, and in 1988 we didn't. ← If you do a study of an appropriate population and find that x% of the population has Condition A, and yet the Center For Disease Control tells you that (say) only .8X of the population has been diagnosed with Condition A, you can say, within a certain confidence interval, that the condition is underdiagnosed. That's like statistics 101. If you are a doctor and you see a large number of people coming to you for unrelated problems and you find out that they also, unknowingly, had Condition A, you can also say, with (less statistically certain) confidence that the condition is underdiagnosed. That's common sense 101. One thing that struck me about the article were that it wasn't a discussion of people who were somewhat overweight and the incremental statistical challenges they might face -- none of this "at 30 pounds overweight you're 6% more likely to become a diabetic" stuff. Perlow was 400 pounds. I never me the guy, so he may be seven feet tall, but at 6'4" I'd consider myself 170 pounds overweight if I was tipping the scales at 400 pounds. Not being judgmental, but there's no getting around the fact that that kind of bodyweight is a dangerous thing to be carrying around. This kind of knocks down the "predisposition" argument -- people might have "heavy genes" but getting above a certain weight takes effort. The other, given Perlow's (and FG's and my and everybody on this board's except a few communist vegetarian types ) delight in pizza, hot dogs, tater tots and other processed foods, was the new Pollan book In Defense of Food (maybe I should get around to reviewing it here, no that I've finally read most of it). He talks about a dentist who went around the world looking for populations that were untouched by modern food processing, trying to find an ideal diet. And what he found was that groups with vastly different diets were very healthy -- vegetarians, blubber-eaters, Swiss mountain men, Pacific tribesmen. Great teeth, too. The only real common thread was exercise and an almost complete lack of processed foods. And so, Pollan comes to a couple of conclusions, among which are that you should "never" eat anything with more than five ingredients, and never eat anything with an ingredient you can't define. Maybe the choice isn't really between pork belly and early death on the one hand and brown rice and a ninth (boring) decade on the other. Maybe it's an easier choice than we like to admit (though, I'm going to miss those Tater Tots).

I've been lax on this because I keep thinking I'll get down to that neighborhood for some errand or another but it keeps not happening. I hesitate to recommend Brasserie Beck to someone who probably lives near 20 of them -- at least this one isn't owned by a chain -- but it offers a decent meal. And I'm not sure what you consider walking distance, but Rasika is a pleasant walk if you have time, and I like their Indian food quite a bit. I seem to recall that you've been to Cafe Atlantico, which can be hit or miss but always seems worth a gamble. Also by the same owner Jaleo and its small plates and Oyamel for upscale Mexican. Again, all these are a nice stroll away, but probably not if you only have an hour for lunch. There's not too much close to the Convention Center itself.

In my experience, the best use of Boursin is to impress college girls with your Euro-suavitude. Served on a loaf of French Bread from the Safeway, with a bottle of French Wine, after watching a French Movie at the local art house (I recommend Jules and Jim) it can be very effective (long as you don't break the cork in half while opening the French Wine). Also, spring for the $5 bread knife at the Safeway, as the cheap flatware you swiped from the dining hall is ineffective on bread that soft.

Might want to consider Mendocino, Circle Bistro, Notte Bianchi, Hook or maybe walk a couple of blocks and hit Mourayo. Really, though, you're well positioned for almost anything. When I used to stay there on business I liked Marcel's, which may be a little formal, and Bistro Francaise which is basic bistro fare. If you're feeling like you want to be a total hipster tryMie n Yu, though I hear the food's not alarmingly good. And if you want a burger, go to Clyde's.

What's "fun?" Elegant, loud, dress-up, jeans? You're a 15 minute walk from a hundred restaurants at that location.