Busboy

I don't think there's any geographic limitations. We're all just having a good time, bragging on our store of obscure foodie knowledge and giving our buddies some high quality, low-cost tips. Ain't nuthin' but a party. You can contribute stuff near your home that is worth driving to from points distant from your abode, or you can (as I did) post something far from your abode that you personally make a trip for. The larger idea's just that these are obscure treats, passions, obsessions that aren't known to the larger public. We all know Maestro makes a great whatever, but I was an attempt to tease out little-known info like Cubano's sandwiches or the dumplings at Bangkok Joe's. "No usual suspects;" no other restrictions.

I'm curious -- what about those great little butchers I used to go to in Boston's North End? I don't know if they were stocking great meat -- not many of their customers were going to shell out $20 for a pound of beef, I think. But in terms of serious butcher skills, like cutting out just the piece of meat you wanted, beautifully boning out or butterflying your cut, and making their own sausage, they seemed pretty damn competent.

I had pig's head in a taverna in Athens it appeared that they had just spit-roasted the whole pig, chopped the head off and and then split the skull in half with a cleaver. In the darkness of the candle-lit outdoor table it was damn hard to scrape more than a little bit of meat at a time. Lots of bone and odd little chambers in a pig's skull. And once, when I thought I had wrestled a particularly large and succelent morsel off, I found myself staring into the pig's eye. I passed. In France I had a more photogenic version. Apparently the head had been braised (whole or in pieces, I cannot say) and the jaw meat was removed, roasted and served with the braised ear. It was one of the best dishes I have ever eaten -- fatty, meaty, crisp on the outside and perfectly tender within. Fergus Henderson has a similar recipe in his book, which I hope to try this winter.

Heck, at our wedding we didn't even invite our own kid. I don't see it in this thread, but there is an "equal and opposite" to the stereotypically self-centered parent who doesn't realize that his or her child is creating a unacceptable ruckus, and that's the self-centered adult who doesn't realize that children are part of life and that exiling them and their parents from polite society is neither necessary or desitreable. I remember once taking my (then) 2-year-old to a hip little joint in Philly and having a waiter so freaked out that he turned our table over to another server. There are people so hypersensitive that the mere sight of a child causes them to break out into vapours -- they remind me the Roald Dahl book, "The Witches." As so often happens, having little tolerance and taking real responsibility go a long way, and would make restaurants and coffee shops a pleasant place for different types of people to enjoy.

Boring. Obvious. Wrong. Nothing on Capitol Hill. No Asian, only the most well-scrubbed Latin, nothing in any area that hasn't been cleansed of the poor and the threatening. It should be called the "cautious Tourist's Guide to Safe Dining." Of the places I've been: Bread Line: Love their bread. Bought five loaves this morning at the market. The Sandwiches are very good. A fine call. Ben's: Holly Moore and I disagree vehemently on this, (never say I'm not "fair and balanced" ,) but I find the place vastly overrated and their chili nasty. Props to Ben Ali and his family for keeping the place going after the riots and (even more devastating) during subway construction, when every other storefront for blocks was shut down. Now that the neighborhood is "revitalized" I expect they do more business between 11PM and 4AM on a Friday night than they used to do in a week back when I lived nearby. An obvious, almost obligatory, choice, but a bad one. Lauriol Plaza: A perfectly mediocre place, much beloved of unadventurous 30-somethings. Another obvious choice. Matchbox: Not bad but, again, something of a no-brainer. Their pizza is not my favorite, but is a quality pie and deserves respect. Many nights, you'll feel less like a Beltway insider than a suburbanite on the way to a basketball game there, as it is just around the corner from the MCI Center. I like to go there early or late, to avoid the crowds. The Diner: Maybe they've inproved, but the one meal I had there (breakfast, which should be a no-brainer) was wretched. Moby Dick: Best pick on the list. Cheap, good, a bit obscure.

It appears that all of us who have yet to make it out here are missing something.

Have not, but was already mentally planning a jaunt out that direction anyway, and so will put it on the shopping list. Thanks.

Any idea who to talk to or what the minimum order might be?

I wouldn't necessarily call it a "problem". The democracy of bars/cafes/restaurants seems to me to dictate that any demographic group capable of generating a good income for the owner and not overtly excluding other groups get to take over the joint. If ten mommies are in the house, the three laptoppers are outvoted. But that's another discussion. To the other point, there are a lot of neighborhoods that have flipped dramatically in the last 5-10 years, just as the coffee shop thing and the hip urban neighborhood things got trendy. When I lived in DC's U street are ten years ago, there was one (independent) coffee shop and almost no yuppie parents beyond my wife and I. At the same time the Starbucks trend kicked into overdrive, a lot of people who probably wouldn't have considered my neighborhood appropriate for baby-raising in 1990, decided that an old house in Logan was a good investment and moved in. Thus, two phenomena come together to create a third. You know better than me, but I'll wager it's a very similar set of circumstances in Brooklyn.

Not implying that that's the whole story but I think, in this case, it's an aggravating circumstance. Jujubee is right the people in this article on both sides are portrayed (or portray themselves) in a particulalry unflattering light.

The breastfeeding thing is funny because, if there's one thing that keeps a kid quiet, it's chowing down on mom. I continue to think that the kids in restaurants "problem," is overstated -- maybe I'm just lucky -- but I can sure see where a less-structured place like a coffee shop could go to hell quick. There atmosphere is more conducive to wandering around or letting your children wander, and you'd feel comfortable bringing younger kids in, in the first place. The potential for disaster is there. And it says something to me when an owner -- who after all, has to make a balanced decision -- than a customer, who is free to be purely self-centered, makes a complaint. Also, imagine a place defined by bike couriers, students, gays, artistes and all the other statistically-more-likely-to-be-childless, broke and hip-types who break these neighborhoods in finding "their" coffee shop take over by a gang of stay-at-home moms and their toddlers? Can you say culture clash?

While I personally don't see breast-feeding as a problem... ...don't owners of stores, cafes, and other spaces have the right to set certain ground rules on their own premises without "the neighborhood" getting involved? Since the spokesperson here is the alderwoman --an elected official -- this sounds like it spiraled to a much larger, organized issue beyond new moms exercising their right to boycott a cafe. ← Well, for breastfeeding in particular, the general rule is if it's a public place that would normally allow a woman and a baby, then breastfeeding is fine. The main point is that breastfeeding is not indecent exposure. So in this case, the woman should be able to breastfeed in a bookstore. If it were, say, a private club or a bar, i.e. a place where a baby wouldn't be allowed anyway, then they can set rules such as no breastfeeding. ← I think the more interesting facet of that unlovely exchange was that it took place in Women and Children First, "a feminist bookstore." Given their website and their stringent storytime regulations, I'm thinking that their devotion to young children is more theoretical than emotional.

I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't. I'm saying that we DO. That is a main reason for farm subsidies being as they are. Are you saying that out of firsthand knowledge? I have a general understanding of how many farms work it, but I think your view is somewhat distorted. ← 60% of gfarms get no subsidies. 10% of the remaining farms -- 4% of all farms -- get 72% of the subsidy. I'm not saying that family farms are fronts in a money-laundering sense, but in the sense that huge operations invoke the image of the family farm as a front for their battle for billions of dollars in subsidies. Check out this chart to see what percentage of my tax dollars went to small farms and what percentage went to spreads raking in between 50 thousand and $14 million in subsidies alone -- while remembering that 67% (in 2004) of farmers made it through the year without a dime. Without arguing agricultural subsidies as a whole, the system as it stands now is indefensible.

Most nights -- ok, many nights -- we try to sit down to a "civilized" meal. Proper settings, cloth napkins (I loathe paper napkins), flatware set out nicely. If there are flowers around, we'll get them out and we candles a lot. We have a variety of options when it comes to plates (from bone china to tin bowls), napkins, and silver, so sometimes there's a brief discussion about that. Nora (12) sets the table and has been given her Lala's admonition to "set the table with love" so many times she usually does a nice job. Sometimes we plate and pay a little attention to presentation, sometimes we serve family-style and don't, depends on the dinner -- and the cook's mood. I think, on a Wednesday night, the idea is to have the nicest dinner you can have, for the least amount of fuss. We're lucky that over the years we've accumulated enough serving stuff and cooking experience that it's fairly easy to do. Of course, some nights we just eat a carry-out pizza in front of a video. But, to echo Alinka, for those of us raised to eat "properly," there's a cheap thrill in that, too.

I was busted with cured pork coming in from France. I guess I looked suspicious because they asked me directly about it and then slid my bags, one-by-one, into a large pork-sensing device (really!). They threw it into a container and sent me off, after extracting a promise that I would never smuggle pork again.

I find the cafe menu much overrated and service in the back room dicey at times. So I like to sit in the cafe and eat off the back room menu, zeroing in on anything with fish -- which they seem to do better than anyone in town -- or bacon.

The most important reason we have massive corn subsidies -- and a boondoggle ethanol program -- is that Iowa is a key state in the presidential nomination process. According to this website, about 850,000 farmers pocketed corn subsidies from Uncle Sugar (corn sugar, in this case) and 72% of all subsidies (includes fiber, I think) go to the biggest 10% of farmers, ie "agribusiness." 60% of farms get nothing. Regardless of whether or not farmers should be elegible for billions of dollars in subsidies while, say, gas station owners and booksellers are not, running a program in such a way that rewards overproduction and thus pushes subsidy payments up even higher is perverse and wrong. In addition to the expense, subsidies distort land use decisions -- why grow low pesticide arugula (or whatever) when you can get a de facto welfare payment for growing corn, and not have to worry about the weather. In addition, corn and other agricultural subsidies depress prices worlkdwide, hitting impoverished nations, in which agriculture is a much larger portion of the economy, particularly hard. Farmers forced off their land then become fodder for low-wage factories (the kind the lure U.S. manufacturers offshore) or they show up as illegals in the U.S. Finally, the argument that we should pay farmers not to look for work off the farm is specious. Maybe we should flip GM a couple of billion to help them keep auto workers on the assembly line, or write checks to all those small mills in the rural south that are shutting down due to foreign competition. Small farms have a strong emotional hold on Americans. But they're becoming a damn expensive habit. And, too often, small family farmes are just a front for the much huger operations that rake in the real money.

Anything with Chesapeake Bay seafood -- not just the crabs, but the oysters and the rockfish -- or Virginia ham gets pretty close to iconic. Wild duck, when it's in season. (You don't see much Terrapin Maryland anymore, though). When I think of the local food I think simple, southern-inflected stuff. The grits line is somewhere in between Arlington and Richmond, don't even think of asking for hash browns once you cross it (except at Waffle House). Fish fries, especially in the African American community. Corn, corn bread cole slaw, watermelon. The products of all those orchards that dot Appalachian hillsides, especially the peaches. There's some decent barbecue around, too.

Serve what you think tastes good. Think what you'd order in a Paris bistro -- probably just the house red. Get something a little rustic. I'd look for a burly little Cotes du Rhone, myself, though a nice Alsation sounds good, too -- that gewurtz or pinot gris (or pinot blanc, which I prefer).

I'm pretty sure Saint-Veran is a Burgundy, not a Bordeaux. I like a good Chablis with oysters, myself, or a white Graves.

Not that I can recall seeing any type of sea urchin around, except occasionally in sushi places, but I'd really like to bring the critters home fresh to play with. Any ideas?

Maybe. I worked 3rd shift at a state psychiatric facility for several years, and I'd say about 3/4 of us were smokers (I quit ~3 years ago). I'm not sure how we compared to other shifts, but there were certainly a higher proportion of smokers on 3rd shift than in the community at large. The job was also extremely stressful, which reinforced the urge to smoke. ← I think working nights is another symptom, not the cause. Waiters, chefs, cooks, actors, unemployed writers and rock stars don't play by "their" rules and take a certain pride in showing it. There's a feeling of apartness and an outlow mentality that comes with working odd hours, not having a "real" job and being in a creative, high pressure profession that brings a disdain for the way other people live. As Harry Dean Stanton eloquently puy it in Repo Man, "Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate 'em." I had a bit of that attitude as a waiter and when I worked on political campaigns -- at the time, another high-smoking profession. Of course, the flip side of the argument is that people with "outlaw" tendencies end up in off certain professions, but then you get into a chicken/egg question.

Not sure where you live -- and hence what is convenient -- but An-Binh in Wheaton (11216 Georgia Ave., 301-942-6642 right in the Wheaton Triangle) has the prettiest pork belly I have ever seen anywhere, and also serves up a great Ban Mi (Vietnamese submarine sandwich). In town, I go to the Asian/Latin/Yuppie Bestway on Mt. Pleasant and Kilbourne streets, for less worthy but eminently serviceable version belly bits. (Edited to change "Super Savor" to "Bestway." I can never keep those two store's names straight.)

Hot, hot, hot indian food. Washed down with a half bottle of burly Zinfandel. This is not only tasty, it has curative powers, as well.

We were trying to call the Circle Bistro to see if they were still serving at 10:30 Friday night and the front desk of the hotel in which CB lives couldn't seem to put me through to anything other than a pre-recorded reservation line. Eventually, they got tired of me calliong back and just told the place was closed, but by then we had already completed the drive from the Kennedy Center to Washington Circle and we decided to check ourselves. I had a vague memory of running into Chef Cox at The Office one Saturday night and -- while I often forget important things while drinking, like where my wife is, why it was important to order so much white Burgundy, or that I have to get up at 6AM the next day to drive a child to camp -- I generally remember more important information, like Brendan saying he served until 11PM. Good thing we checked, or we sould have missed a great treat. Someone told Brendan that we were there and, though we had never actually spent a nickel in his place until that night, he amused us with some ameuses, including a tasty moresel of home-made pate, a demi-tass of onion soup in which rested a crouton spread with duck liver - I may never go back to Gruyere -- and pommes dauphine, mashed potatoes which had been piped out and deep- fried, so that the outside has a crunch and the inside is creamy and light. It was quite good. The first course contained the dish of the night, a simple salad of frisee, bacon -- and a bacon fat dressing (!) -- with a poached egg on top and sauteed royal trumpet mushrooms (which I had never heard of before but will not rest until I have again) below. One of those peasant things that makes you pray that your next life will be lived as a peasant. It's only on the menu for a limitied time; get some before it goes away. A round of steak tartare was excellent, and a duck breast served with baby turnips and celeriac puree seemed like a perfect way to usher in the autumn dining season -- rich, warming and perfectly cooked. We were pretending to ourselves that we were on a budget, so it was pleasing to see a lot of reasonably-priced wines on the list, including the serviceable Sancerre we quaffed up until the duck arrived (and I got a glass of Zin). We passed on the dessert (that budget thing again) but did get a few chips of ten-year-old Gouda, along with some Livarot and an Italian whose name escapes me, which is so rich and concentrated that the taste sort of stays in your mouth the whole ride home. Brendan dropped by to say "howdy" and talk about mushrooms (trumpeting). Not surprisingly, being named in the Post's annual Dining Guide has been bringing people in, putting Putting Brendan and the rest of the team in a good mood. It was a fine dinner and -- not that I don't love my Steak-Frites -- it is great to find and alternative to BdC and Bistro Francais for after-Symphony dining.