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Andrew Fenton

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Posts posted by Andrew Fenton

  1. 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.

    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.

  2. 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...

  3. Sonic consistently has the best fountain drinks for a chain.

    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.

  4. only ate at arby's once - we all refer to it as the green meat incident. we were in florida and in order to avoid my grandmother's cooking ate just before we got to her house. my mom, sister and i all had roast beef and cheese sandwiches. the meat was so cottony - my sister opened her bun to look at it to make sure it was meat - it was green - not just slightly irridescent but GREEN. :shock: we all looked at our respective sandwiches and saw they were the same.

    Happy St. Patrick's Day?

  5. 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.

  6. canned garbanzo beans, rinsed and skin removed, seasoned with salt, dredged in some flour, then thrown in a hot pan on top of the stove until the flour cooks and the beans turn crunchy-- really simple and really tasty!

    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.

  7. 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..."

  8. True. However, Milford is closer physically and and more connected geo-psychologically (if I can coin a term) to the NW suburbs, where much of the money resides.

    Good point. So how long a drive would you say it is on average? (if such an average is possible to estimate, that is...)

    (On a related note, lots of people I've met here in Grand Rapids are amazed that we'd drive a half-hour for dinner at a favorite restaurant in Holland.)

    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... :laugh:

  9. Tribute is in Farmington Hills and they are doing very well for themselves.  I know that Ann Arborites are willing to take the trip to this restaurants, do you think that other well to do Southeast Michiganders would be willing to make the trip to Ann Arbor?

    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?

  10. 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.

  11. I ask myself the same question all the time.  I think the best buys in Ann Arbor are at the low end - there's some really cheap, really good lunch food to be found - Jeruselum Garden, Earthen Jar, Le Dog, Kosmo Deli, Sabor Latino, just to name a few.  I never have trouble figuring out where to take people for lunch in Ann Arbor. 

    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?

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