Andrew Fenton

Good suggestion, and one worth checking out... (Here's a link to a map of that neighborhood, with Sweet Lucy's marked.)

Gee Rich, how come so many of those pictures are tilted like that? Must've been a good evening...

What type of loaf did you buy? Did you eat it straight or with a schmear of something? Whole wheat, with lots of little seeds. I tore off a piece to eat on my walk home. Then I made a peanut butter and Asian pear butter sandwich, with a glass of milk. Very nice.

Funny, just last night as I picked up a loaf from my local fancy-pants bread bakery, I was thinking much the same thing: damn, this is good stuff. Also wondering: has Atkins hurt the artisanal baking industry much? Doesn't look like it from where I sit, but what do I know...

"Most underrated," eh? How... appropriate. Guess I should go check out the magazine, then...

Better than Coke at Waffle House? Surely not... On the best Coke, period, I'm with Chris: it's Mexican Coke in the glass bottles. But the best all-around soda I've had in ages was last weekend at Pizza Club: the Top Road Tavern in Trenton, NJ has birch beer on tap. Tremendous stuff.

And I say: mucilaginalicious! Yes.

I'd second the Salmon and add Dungeness Crab. And beer, but specifically microbrews. Surely coffee?

Ah, my momma made this when I was a kid. She's from California, though, and just called it "chicken tortilla casserole." Good stuff. But "King Ranch Chicken" sounds so much better...

Oh, sure: I get excited because my KA grinder arrives, then fifteen minutes later I find out it's not gonna be enough... Good thing I'm not planning on grinding any whole animals. Yet.

Katie, if you are trolling, troll this way! I saw the B&C list, but to be honest, I had no idea who'd be good or not, so just shrugged it off. I'm willing to put myself in your capable hands!

No worries; the Cheesecake Factory thread is an evergreen one.

Happy St. Patrick's Day?

There was a thread on it a while back. Let's just say that it's wrong. McRib wrong.

I've been, and it's pretty good. Same sort of idea as Monk's, with the Belgian beers, burgers, frites and whatnot. You can get Kwak (my favorite beer name) in the cool carriage glass. They have a room with a coffin in it. I found the food to be perfectly adequate-to-good, of the stuff-that-goes-well-with-drinking variety. I'm sure that somebody (like Rich, for instance) can evaluate the beer list better than I can.

Also good are lima beans, sauteed in a little olive oil with lots of garlic. I always hated lima beans; eventually I realized that that was because I'd always had them served as a vegetable. When you serve them as a starch- crispy, garlicky and salty- they're fantastic.

Are cherimoyas grown in the US anywhere besides California? I've only tried one once and found it underwhelming: not much flavor of any kind. My suspicion is that it was shipped in from Chile or something and didn't deal well with transit. I'd love to try a good cherimoya. Especially because every time I hear the word I can't help but think "cherimoya was a bullfrog..."

I would like to join this campaign. Where do I sign up?

That's a great idea! Thanks. I've still gotta make it happen, ideally in one day, and ideally in as small a radius as possible. I'm thinking it should be doable in Jersey.

I'm convinced that people like miniature desserts- individual cheesecakes, souffles, and so forth- because they like not having to share.

Good point. So how long a drive would you say it is on average? (if such an average is possible to estimate, that is...) Hell, a couple of weeks ago I drove two hours from Philly to north Jersey for the eG Chinese New Year dinner... and on Saturday I'm driving an hour to go get pizza. And yes, I've gotten a blank stare or two about this...

From my twelve years of having lived in both Detroit and the burbs, I very strongly suspect not. I believe that there are only a very small percentage of such people who would be motivated enough to drive 45-60 min. (with reasonable traffic and weather), especially during the week, for a Tribute-type dinner. Detroit, unfortunately, is not Chicago. What about the Five Lakes Grill? Milford is pretty far from anything, and yet people are willing to drive out there, aren't they?

Interesting. I had no idea that the Penang restaurants had spread so far and wide: Atlanta, Boston, Chapel Hill... I've eaten at the Philadelphia location several times, and it has always been pretty good. It's an interesting, and unusual, restaurant to turn into a chain: for one thing, the menu (at least in Philly) is significantly more diverse than you'll see at any sort of a chain. Fish head stew, that sort of thing. I'll be intrigued to see how it works out for them.

This was always my experience when I lived in A2 (I moved away in 1998.) For cheap food, it can't be beat: to that list, I'd add the Korean greasy spoons and Blimpy Burger as places that I still miss. And Zingerman's, while it isn't cheap, is a wonderful deli. But I never found any really amazing restaurants on the high end. I liked Moveable Feast (now Daniel's; didn't know that) but it wasn't overwhelmingly good. I wonder if, despite an educated, affluent population, it just doesn't have enough people to support such places. I guess a way to test that hypothesis would be to compare it to similar cities: Madison? Chapel Hill?

That is entirely possible.