Busboy

A relevant article here, tending to support the more cynical view of why top Cabs and Bordeaux are so ridiculously expensive.

Probably my favorite dish. Lucky you, proper stockfish is nearly impossible to achieve outside of a Niçois context. How do they make it at La Merenda? I hope they don't rejuvenate it in any way. ← I have now had stockfish exactly once, but if by "rejuvinating it" you mean dumbing it down for tourists -- "lightening" or "harmonizing with today's lighter tastes" I'm sure one would call it -- you can rest assured that they did no such thing. It was brutal and addictive, and they were clearly were worried about serving it to two Americans. The waiter asked twice if we were sure we wanted it and the kitchen actually set out a small sample, to give us a chance to back out. It is, I am sure, an acquired taste, I acquired it about the third spoonful. We did pay deference to its strength by moving up from the rose to the red, even that barely stood up to it. My wife swore that I smelled like it for a full day after. I was told that it wasn't made with morou, which they characterized as salt cod, but with cod that had been dried by another method and preserved for at least a year. Potatoes, red peppers, (Olives?) a great deal of garlic are the flavors that, in addition to the fish, stand out.

It appears that I can fly to Florence and stay at a decent hotel -- my standards are low, as long as I'm in some place like Florence -- for substantially less than I can buy a case of '05 Cos d'Estournal. (And one bit of practical advice I intend to take is to look at the off-vintages now being eclipsed by this, what is it, third "vintage of the century" so far?). (Would I be shot for ordering Bordeaux in Florence? It seems so un-kosher somehow.) Oh well, one good recession and I'll be drinking like a king. In the mean time, I am in the land cheap cafe wine and am getting by without the good stuff.

Popped into La Merenda last night for the second time and am convinced that, despite its fame, it is a brilliant gem. Stockfish -- I now dream of stockfish!

The difference -- and I'm not pretending I'm not being utterly self-centered here -- is that I can fly to Florence and, in two days "consume" billions of euros worth of art. In fact, living on the east coast of the US I can get an inexpensive fill of many, many of the world's greatest artists. And, indeed, if I hit a special exhibition and read closely, I'll usually find that some of the pieces on exhibit have been lent by collectors and most are owned by museums who received them as bequests or gifts from collectors. Haven't yet seen a collector send a case of 1900 d'Ychem on tour yet, but will be in line when that day comes. So, those us without means to buy "the best" wines, can at least see "the best" art (hell, I can buy Joyce for 5 bucks at a used book store). And, of course, agitate for the grand cru boycott. Salut!

I thought the "liquid assets tax" was pretty much a dead giveaway.

I’ve read all of your comments with great interest and have taken many of them to heart. I am now convinced that a boycott will not work, as those pushing wine prices into the stratosphere have no interest in my ability to afford it, which is, in fact, my only real concern. Therefore, I have decided that more radical action is needed to suppress demand and thus being prices down to my level, and propose the following: Since the United States is always in some sort of trade or diplomatic tussle with the French and, to a lesser extent, the EU, I propose that next time we turn up the pressure by slapping a 100% tariff on the value of all wine shipped over $20/bottle wholesale. This should put a crick in the demand curve and, as you know, the price that comes from a 10% oversupply is dramatically different from the price that results from a 10% undersupply. Sure, trade wars can’t last forever, but a couple of years of low demand should have a beneficial effect on the price of premium German, Italian and French wines. Second, I believe we should impose a significant “liquid assets” tax on all those bottles gathering dust in the cellar, one that increases gradually with the age of the bottle. This will see that these wines are indeed being drunk and shared, or provide incentive for dumping them on the market, punishing speculators and the idle rich, who will find themselves either nursing hangovers or selling at a loss. I think this proposal will be acceptable to the left-of-center political parties the world ‘round, who are continuously looking for funds to support their semi-socialist schemes (like subsidizing grape-growing) and who will find wine collectors even easier to caricature than foie gras eaters. Third, the revenue from the liquid assets tax in the U.S. should be used to provide a special tax break for planting Cabernet and Merlot in California (sorry, Oregon, your Pinots are still comparatively reasonable). One every Vice President for Software Development in Silicon Valley with a few bucks in stock options and a few bottles of Screaming Eagle in the cellar starts ripping up hillsides and throwing money at Helen Turley, the market will be flooded high-alcohol fruit bombs boasting 94s from Parker and 96s from the Wine Spectator. Just as growing Chinese demand for energy has played a significant role in recent oil price hikes, their demand for fine wine is helping to push its cost to the Bordelaise equivalent of $78/barrel. Therefore, just as we pay coca growers and opium farmers to switch production to grains and coffee, I will be asking America’s entertainment and high-tech industries to fund a program to shift Chinese counterfeiters from DVDs and software, to fine wines that can be dumped onto the Asian markets. Don’t think of it as cheap swill under a fake label – think of it as purple biofuel. These are indeed radical proposals, but desperate times demand desperate acts. I have already begun lobbying members of the minority party to include these proposals in their 2008 platform, I invite one of my friends from the other side of the aisle join me in working with the majority party on this issue, in a true show of bipartisan populism. The time to act is now. Before my next big dinner party.

At lease 99% of the mansions in Dunwoody are new, not old. Until the late '60s, most of it was a single farm owned by the Spruill family. What's left of their spread is the Farmhouse Tea Shoppe, which does events, and is probably worth checking out. I'm not sure if they do alcohol, though. There's another old house on the east side of Ashford-Dunwoody Road, just north of Perimeter Mall. I recall that they do events, but I can't remember if it's a food-related facility, or a place where you'd have to have a caterer bring in comestibles. Unfortunately, I also can't remember what it's called, but maybe someone else will. (It also might be a completely bogus memory.) If you're willing to forego historical authenticity, there are a couple of restaurants on a nice lake -- again, just north of Perimeter Mall. One is a chain (Brio), but it seems like the other is something else. Again, my memory fails me, and I call on other members to help out. ← Heck, I remember "Old" Dunwoody -- my parents moved there in 1978 (I tracked them down in '79). My main hangout there is the Waffle House and, of course, my mom's dining room, so I don't know the area well. Authenticity is nice, and it's not that unusual, in my experience, for someone to have held onto a farmhouse after selling the pasture for development that ends up as a restaurant, so I wondered if there was something like that around. Lakes are nice, too, though and even a chain that gives us a deck and a view would work.

Thanks for the reccs. I'm wary of anything that calls itself a banquet facility, since I've never had a good meal in one (maybe I've just been going to the wrong ones ) and since the group will be relatively small for that type of thing. Is there someplace under the trees? A modest-sized room in an old mansion? Something with character?

My parents will be celbrating their 50th on September 1; relatives will be gathering. We would love to find a space where 15-25 people could get together for a long, probably early-evening cocktail reception and dinner. With this group, food is probably not as important as gracious surroundings, though food is not unimportant. Cost is a consideration, but we're willing to spend a bit to make this happen. We will consider anything from a pig-picking to a sit-down multi-course meal, and my wife and I have a deep horror of windowless private rooms, no matter how swank the establishment is otherwise. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Anyone who warned you off Eden Center is utterly paranoid. The place is as perfectly safe as anywhere in the Metro area and moreso than places I walk through every day. That's like not eating dinner in North Jersey because Tony Soprano might come through. And, while you could go years without eating steak and potatoes in the area, when you do get a hankering for them you might want to make the drive into Arlington for the legendary Ray's the Steaks.

As irked as I am by how much I spend, I almost always enjoy what I eat because I almost always taste before I buy. Never had a farmer come across the table at me as I sample cherries and strawberries, and almost everyone puts out peaches and tomatoes (still early season for them, but the batch I picked up last week went down real nice). Smell the greenbeans. Touch the lettuce. Trust your senses. One of my favorite market memories is my daughter, then 9 or so, going through a bushel basket of cantaloupes smelling and knuckle-rapping each one with all the seriousness of a French housewife, looking for the perfect melon. Which, of course, she found. (This time next week she'll be shopping for Cavaillons.) (Pontormo: white peaches; ripe in 8 hours, overripe in 16)

I agree with Sandy, this is a win. Every case of Hunt's "organic" tomatoes shipped-- no matter how far from "organic" the purists might find them -- represents a non-trivial (as my economist buddyputs it) decline in the amount of fertilizer and pesticides in our environment. (I don't have time to google away this morning, but my understanding is that the organic community's main beef (ha ha) with USDA-certified is that it allows genetically modified food and, I believe, food that has been radiation-sterilized to be labeled organic.)

Actually, there are lots of good Ethiopian place in DC -- if that's you're speed, you're in luck. Check out some of the links in this thread which lists restaurants out of town as well as in town. Don't know how mobility-limited you are, but whenever I get west of the city, I detour to Eden Center for a Vietnamese binge. I guess it's 20-25 minutes from Reston and worth the drive.

I have heard nothing of it, and have a hard time picturing where it might go.

I don't know if everyone but me has already made it to the Cote d'Azur, but if you can make it through the French, Le Figaro has an interesting run-down on a number of changes behind the line. The one that caught my eye was La Mirazeur, in Menton "the most wonderful news, incontestably...two young people from Arpege and Alain Passard...incredibly fresh and bright cooking...laughably inexpensive (35E lunch, 70E dinner)." Might have to check it out myself.

Come on, Busboy. If the brand-name wines are expensive, seek out good wines that aren't brand names, or fashionable. Don't go after the wines everyone else is chasing. (Chasing, in some cases, simply because other people are chasing them, or because of being told to chase them.) It leads to absurd extremes discussed here before, such as offerings of $60,000 magnums of famous 60-year-old wine that (by the way) was not bottled in magnums. This is why consumers need to develop their palates. That's what countless sincere wine consumers and writers have advocated for decades. Then you can buy by the experience in the glass, not by the brand name. (I'm reflecting for instance on the last 20 years of excellent lesser-known or lesser-appelation Burgundy purchases for $20 a bottle retail or less, which provided lots of pleasure to lots of people. I doubt you could have gone anywhere and looked up these wines in a list when they were on the market, and if you could, they'd have been more expensive for that reason.) Good hunting! -- Max ← Well, what the hell do you think I've been doing? Drinking mineral water? But there is a reason that names like Eschezeaux and and Trotenoy become famous -- and in the days of my misspent youth, even a humble waiter or bike courier could occasionally afford a splurge on a taste of Gravelly Pit or Gaja Barolo(well, maybe not the Gaja). I'd like to be able to do that again. But, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that a $20 lesser appellation Burgundy captures the majesty of a Le Montrachet (or even a lovely little Puligny) I will cease and desist. Until then, I'm the boycott is on.

Hah! We are being gouged! Next World Cup, Toigo's buying the beers, and not me. Bavila -- I don't hunt for organics, just what looks good, and I know that many of the farms at the markets I go to are not organic, so that may not be the root (ha ha) cause. I'd love to see the numbers on a local farm-to-market vs. the Agribusiness-to-Safeway ends of the business. Back in the good old days, Giant used to brag about its local produce. That was before they were bought by an international conglomerate, though.

My first thought on reading Pontormo's post was "$17 at the Dupont Market? What did you get -- a bag of arugula, three plums and an artichoke?" Hard as it is for me not to be glib, I thought I'd instead ask how we expect localization to succeeed when the locally-grown produce is so freakishly expensive? (apparently penury is my theme for the day) My wife and I marvel at the speed money flies from our pockets on market days -- $8/lb bacon; $12/lb haricots; $5/pint strawberries; a plastic baggie of salad greens roughly the same size and cost of the cheap dope I used to buy in college. I'm not accusing the farmers of gouging or getting rich, and yes, the quality and taste are worlds apart from the supermarket stuff, but I'm already cutting back: why pay seven bucks for a pocketfull of potatoes when I can get ten pounds for less than that at the local store? And no more ramps unless I wrench them from the ground myself. More important, unless food prices can be gotten within shouting distance of grocery store prices eating local is doomed to remain a hobby for the monied and food-obsessed minority. If all you want is good produce, that's not a problem. But if you think that localization is good on a larger level, then there's a problem.

In the unlikely event you're not kidding, surely you understand that you don't get to define luxury goods as necessities just because you like them a lot. ← Actually, according to the consumerist propaganda currently pasted to my bus stop (I forget what they're advertising, but the slogan has stuck) "If you want it badly enough, it's a necessity." Of course. That's why I need to rally others to my cause.

Surely you understand that shoes, dresses and Lamborghinis are luxury items while good wine is a necessity. And that, unlike Model T owners, today we can drive 75 miles an hour in air-conditioned luxury while cranking the Grateful Dead (or Berlioz) at unhealthy decible levels for months at a time without even routine maintenance. As for the difference between the 2005 Mouton and the 1982 my wife bought me for Christmas at the then-outrageous price of $100? Not so much. The price level mechanism is indeed a bit imprecise, but it has the advantage of being simple.

A friend of mine recently forwarded and offering of 2005 Bordeaux futures: $6600 for Haut Brion, $7500 for Lafitte and so on. Case prices. Futures. How much is this stuff going to cost by the time it comes to a wine shop or restaurant near you? And Bordeax is hardly alone in this highway robbery, Burgundy, California, Australia...$20 wines now cost $40; $40 wines cost $150; $150 wines cost $600, gargiste fruit-bomb hundred pointers now cost more than a small car. I'm not poor, but the odds of ever enjoying another bottle of, say, Chateu d'Ychem, as I once could do on occasion, are fast lengthening. There's only one hope, one that will benefit us all: a two-year boycott of all wines that cost over $40 retail or $100 in a restaurant. Let's let the Chambertins overflow the caves of Beaune and the Granges sit on the docks of New South Wales for 24 months, let the cellars of snooty steakhouses grow crowded with obscure Cabernets and Old Vine Zins, and lables of Eisweins and Tokajis grow dusty and yellow on the shelves of upmarket liquor stores. In the mean time, we'll search the world for new champions, in Argentina and Greece and California's more obscure hillsides and valleys, showering money and respect on producers who bring passion to their art and respect to their pricing. And when the laws of supply and demand bring prices down from criminal to merely absurd; when we've struck a blow for the common man, to whom we're always denying that wine is a snotty hobby for the titled and rich, why, then we'll decant a Parker-anointed superstar and have a fine old time. First bottle's on me.

Not much clam chowder in the North End except for Neptune, as Jason has already mentioned. I never had the chowder, but people sorta rave about it at Union Oyster House. In fact, curiously, I have heard by numerous people that pretty much everything else at the restaurant is not so good, but the chowder is excellent. I do know that it is where JFK used to eat lunch and they have some sort of booth identified as his favorite. B&G Oysters in the South End had a decent bowl of clam chowder but the price was a bit steep. Their lobster bisque was decent as well. I think the key, as Jason alludes to, is that the steam table is very much not the friend of chowder. Find a place that does a fairly brisk business in chowder. I'd bet the best bowls may be found in the small restaurants outside of Boston to the north. Just a thought. ← Years ago my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I went hunting for the best choeder in Boston and, hate to admit it, the best we found was in one of those tourist joints in Faneuil Hall. We didn't know the city well, though, and only had a weekend, and the North End was too Italian for a Yankee dish like chowdah. As far as the Union goes, it doesn't get much love in the Boston threads for its food, but would likely provide a few good minutes of TV for its centuries-old horseshoe-shaped bar.

Malasia Kopitam is quite good, as is Breadline. If I was going for Burgers I'd go to Circle Bistro, on Washington Circle. Though Old Ebbit isquite credible, it's part of a local chain, and so not as cool. It is a good place to know of if you're still on West Coast Time -- it serves late. Queen Makeda, btw, is a good 25 blocks from the Kennedy Center. If you're on 8th Street on the Hill (I wouldn't go out of my way for any of those spots, but they're likely fine -- almost better to go to the Tune Inn on Pennsylvania and 4th for a bad buger at a legendary bar, 4th and Penn), you're near the Marine Barraks and can watch the Friday parade. If you're feeling less martial, the sculpture garden at the National Gallery, (Not the Hirshorn) has free jazz Friday nights. The snackbar is credibleand it's almost walking distance from the hotel. Thursday Nights is free music at the National Zoo,, pick up a pizza or a sub from Vace, Connecticut and Porter (see Spices/Utown Theater above) and walk down, or go in the back entrance and drop by the Adams-Morgan (the Falafel Shop on 18th) or Mt.Pleasant (Pollo Sabroso) neighborhoods on the way in or out.

In terms of location your friend is in a soulless little backwater, I'm afraid. Once a thriving little slum, the entire SW quadrant of the city was razed in the 50's, all the "poor" -- that is, African American -- people moved out, and the area repopulated with government office buildings and modernist apartments. The food in the area is equally characterless. But, by Metro, the world awaits. Here's some Ethiopian recs, to which I would now add Roha. It may be worth catching the metro up to Columbia Heights and heading either into Adams-Morgan for El Tamarando or into my 'hood, Mt.Pleasant, for Ercilia's Pupusas (Mt. Pleasant St. and Irving Street). You can also wander around this area and look for cheap latin food if you're in the mood. Were I in Georgetown, and it was a nice evening or an un-oppressive afternoon, I would go to Cafe La Ruche, where the locals hang, for an omlette or a pate sandwich on the patio. If they're near Dupont Circle -- and they should see the Philips and the Textile Museum (much cooler than you'd think) -- check and see if Galileo is serving their lunch grill and grab a sandwich to eat in the park. A minor splurge: go to the Osteria Galileo for dinner: excellent,inexpensive food and wine, though service can be indifferent -- it's not you they don't like, it's everyone. Get the boy into some decent shoes for this, it's part of a very swank spot. Also, my favorite place for people watching and swilling god-awful but dirt-cheap wine is the patio at Zorba's Cafe, which serves up decent Greek. I am in between Thai Restarants right now -- I'm separatedfrom Sala Thai at 21st and P -- but there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, scattered across the city, and they are of generally good quality. Full Key, in Chinatown, is a fine place to get beef tendon and jelleyfish, as well as less exotic fare. And many love Ben's Chili Bowl, 13th and U -- near Little Ethiopia and the U Street Metro stop -- for their chili dogs and half-smokes. Sadly, the Vietnamese in the area are have located to fairly distant suburbs which are not metro-friendly. There is one decent spot, Pho 75, on Connecticut Avenue, steps from the Cleveland Park Metro, and if your friend is a movie buff or just wants to kill the evening hours the Uptown Theater is literally one of the best movie screens in the country, and is directly acrossthe street fromPho 75 and the slightly more expensive Spices. They could also splurge by hitting the Cafe at Palena: Burgers, roast chicken, weird fries at a reasonable price. Go early to get a table.