mrbigjas

that was a fun article, and i missed it the first time around. they left out a bunch of my favorite gins, though. plymouth, hendricks, brokers, not to mention that only going with bombay sapphire and not regular bombay is lame. i reckon there are only so many martinis you can drink at a sitting, though. 80 appears to be pushing the limit, according to this article from the NY times a couple weeks ago.

so wait, it's a $20 prix fix? or andrew, do you mean you happened to spend $20 each?

i just saw it yesterday at 12th & chestnut. i was wondering about it. web reviews rate it from way too limey and weird, to beautifully balanced. i don't know if i wanna spend another $22 to find out quite yet, since i have about three bottles of gin sitting here.

agreed, alcibiades. in addition, i feel like a lot of the latest gins have veered too far toward the citrus and away from the really herbal, juniper-y aromas. cf. bluecoat, which tastes good, and i love the concept of gin being distilled here in town, but it doesn't taste enough like GIN for me. a gin & tonic doesn't need a lime squeezed into it, when i make it with that. that's why i always keep a bottle of seagrams or gilbey's around for mixed drinks. or gordon's. or even brokers if i'm feeling four bucks fancier. they just taste like gin to me.

The cheesesteak, roast beef and roast pork sammies are all first class, easily some of the best in the city. The cheesesteak earned the BOP. It's that good. ← i had one last summer and was unimpressed. it was dry and chewy and generally not so good. which caught me off guard because everything else i've had there has rocked the house. because of that, i'm assuming i caught them at a rare off moment.

awesome -- i emailed griggstown last year trying to find out how/where to get their product, because i have a friend who lives literally about 1/2 mile down the road from them, but they never wrote me back.

Unadulterated rhubarb? And risk the wrath of an angry, strawberry-deprived wife? A terrifying prospect... ← you have a very good point there. but i still say there's only one real sweetener for rhubarb: sugar, and plenty of it. i'ma make a rhubarb pie this weekend.

totes. and superfresh right across the way. you could search for onstreet parking, but why bother? if you wanna take public transportation, the broad street line stops at south and at ellsworth/federal. but broad street is five blocks from 9th, so it'll be a little walk.

for the love of god don't adulterate that rhubarb with strawberries, andrew!

i never asked for cocktail sauce, so i don't know the answer. i also don't like ketchup on a hot dog, but i always get it on the combo. it works. i was just there last week, and man is that good.

i read in the city paper or weekly last week that gayle does thursdays.

get a 40 and go hang down on the wissahickon. outdoor drinking at its finest.

rangoon!

you have a very good point there, and that's what i get for not reading back through the thread. i think i'm gonna continue going kinda early and sitting at one of the bars. without a reservation. because i live on the edge. re: the special, the mrs was all, THIRTY TWO BUCKS? and i pointed out that it's only like $5 more than most of the entrees, so really it's no big deal. it's not special if it doesn't cost a little more! but still, in my heart of hearts, it wasn't the price that stuck in my head as what we were paying that price for. it's pork shoulder, after all. and a few beans. i know favas are labor-intensive and all, but still. edited to add: we were sitting at the kitchen bar, which incidentally has great indirect light from the giant windows, for you photographer types. but that's what was so funny about it--you're sitting there and someone comes up behind you to hand you something. and then a few minutes later there's someone else giving you another glass of wine, that you had asked yet another person for, a few minutes before that.

they had something similar the night we went there last week -- a pork shoulder, roasted overnight then grilled. it was very tasty, tender, a little smoky but kind of overpriced at $32. i mean, it's just pork shoulder! five or six little slices, with like 10 fava beans. (note that i'm not trying to start that debate again -- other than that i thought the prices weren't out of line at all) we had those little bitty robiola ravioli with the mushrooms in the butter sauce. fantastically rich, unbelievably tender. awesome. and that grilled octopus. i'm not ready to put it above dmitri's or ansill's yet, but it's right alongside. i really have to learn to make octopus. it just can't be that hard. i liked the pizza a lot, but i don't know that i'm as totally enamored as everyone else is. the wood-burning oven pizza i've loved in the past (cf. two amy's in DC, or that place in rome that's totally famous for it) has more spring in the crust, so the crust is bigger and poofier and rounder, a little chewy along with the char. it might just be a matter of spreading the toppings not quite so close to the edge, i don't know. btw did you have a hard time chewing through the clam and mussel shells, phil? i also agree with the earlier comments about the service -- we had about five different people bringing us our dinner and wine and whatnot, which is a little weird in that you don't know who to turn to for what at any given point. but we loved it, and would go back in a second. i don't know that we can actually afford to go as often as i'd like, but it's the kind of place where i'm gonna hit it up as often as possible. really nice.

they're the organic produce guys in the middle of the terminal next to dinic's roast pork. they put a sign out about grass-fed beef when they have it.

well, all i needed to do was come to work and look in my browser history. turns out it was calabrian. or at least that's what the site said it was -- i don't know how reputable this site is. here's the recipe. (edited to add: that photo is kind of disturbing, which is kind of why i wanted to make it) i did cook the elements separately. grilled the sausages, made polenta, sauteed rapini with chilis and garlic. i made a chili garlic paste as well from some recipe i found, but the ratio of oil to chilis and garlic was too high, and it was just enough to be too little for the stick blender, but too big for my mortar and pestle. so it was a little chunky. tasted good though. (the sausages were from martin's meats in the reading terminal market. they're great)

grass-fed beef is available at the fair foods farmstand at the terminal. also livengood's has it. you can also get it at the farmer's market that's at the glenside train station on sundays. probably other places as well -- does the passyunk ave farmer's market have it?

thanks franci. i guess i'll just make sausages and polenta and rapini tonight. maybe i'll make some chili garlic paste, just to liven things up.

can any of you help me? the other day i was looking through the interwebs for basilicata recipes, and i found one for green polenta, where somehow the polenta was cooked with broccoli rabe, and then served with grilled lucanica sausages. well, i have polenta, i have broccoli rabe, i have the local version of lucanica sausage... and i just spent like 20 minutes googling for that damn recipe and i can't find it. i just don't remember the specifics of cooking the broccoli rabe with the polenta -- i can't imagine cooking it for the 20 minutes or however long it takes to make polenta (yeah, i know, 45 minutes). anyway, did any of you come across it in your research? p.s. there was even a picture of the dish, in a bowl with sausages around the edge. i swear i'm not nuts.

was it fish mint? diep ca or dap ca? here's a picture (page down a little) a local place near us always includes that on the herb plate when you get beef in grape leaves. and i always eat a couple leaves hoping that one of these days i'll start to like it, but it hasn't happened yet.

i've heard good things about lovash, but haven't been. i like stopping at cafe spice for lunch at grand central when the timing is right. i've never been to the one here. i like tiffin, especially their dal that's like, the brownish purplish one? it's got flavors i can't quite identify. i know how to make a couple of kinds of dal, but that one's a mystery to me and delicious. my only real problem with them is that i order them for lunch and it comes and seems like so much food, and then i start to eat it, and then it's weeeellllll, just one or two bites more, and then well, there's not that much left, i might as well finish it--and then it's food coma all afternoon. it's kinda depressing, the indian selection here in town. last time i went to new delhi, it was like, what's the point? it was just kinda boring. maybe i'll check it out again. do a little survey of the indian joints up on 40th, see if any are any good.

hey that's a good thought! he makes faces when i give him beer and wine. he had his first taste of goat at puebla last week (he seemed ambivalent about it); i'd say porchetta is in his future. that chewy crackly skin would be a great teething chew toy....

italian market festival, you gotta eat a porchetta sandwich. and don't forget to grab a few hunks of the skin. have a limoncello at villa di roma. slurp a few oysters at anastasi and wash them down with an ice cold budweiser. get onea them mangos that the mexican vendors cut up, with the chili powder and lime. schweet. see you there. keep an eye out for this guy. he wasn't there last year but you never know!

i have to admit i've noticed that the spice level seems to have gone down the last few times i've had food from there. i wonder if that's because i'm ordering delivery, so they're assuming that it's just some random person ordering random chinese? i mean, as compared to showing up at the place and specifically ordering all the szechuan specialties.