Pan

Thanks for your report, Seth. This is a place I really want to visit some time. It's in my neighborhood, and at one time, I passed by to take a look, spoke with some customers waiting to ask about the possibility of having a table later (impossible, it turned out), and ended up getting into a conversation with the host, who was friendly and gracious in spite of how very busy he was. He lent me their long and impressive annotated wine list to look at. It'll take some planning to dine at the Tasting Room because, as Seth noted, it's a small room, and demand greatly exceeds the supply of tables.

Beans, do you pay more for delivery or takeout???

If the broth wasn't piping hot when you got it, the restaurant goofed. Yes, it's usual for the beef to arrive raw, as the others have already stated.

It's almost unbelievable that that litany of foods was eaten in one day by one person!

A lot of celebrities do, in fact, eat at home. And not all celebrities do what they do in order to become celebrities. I think Jeff Smith did, though.

I can understand why a celebrity would be annoyed at being hindered from eating; can't you? I don't think I'd bother a celebrity while s/he was eating.

Joanne, based on your remarks, I Googled on Chengde. Looks beautiful! It looks like it might have worked as a stopover on the way to Changchun if I had taken the train, but I think my brother booked a round-trip flight from Beijing to Changchun.

I never ate at La Cote Basque and haven't been to LCB Brasserie Rachou, but this Diner's Journal article gave me a warm feeling. How does it strike the rest of you?

I like red currants (frutti di bosco in Italian) in macedonia di frutta. For a real treat, I sometimes got macedonia di frutta con gelato at my favorite bar on the Piazza del Campo in Siena. The fruit salad included red currants, blackberries, sliced apples, and a bunch of other things (I don't remember all of them, but I think there were some watermelon slices and a bit of citrus), and was topped by three scoops of whatever gelato flavors I asked for (probably chocolate, hazelnut, and vanilla some of the time). I Googled for recipes for macedonia di frutta, and the upshot seems to be that there is no one recipe. Just use a good mixture of fruits and combine them with whatever you like (some liqueur is sometimes but not always used).

No. They're juicy, sweet, fragrant fruits, and whoever was first to call them a "nut" was himself a nut. But coconuts count, as the part we eat is part of the nut. We discard the hard shell, eat the pulp, and drink the water (among other things one can do with the edible portions of the nut). The fruit of the coconut is the husk.

Yes, I have. I like it a lot!

Hire this woman for Marketing Director! Brilliant! Sometimes, the best solutions really are the "obvious" solutions no-one else can see in front of their faces. Are you listening, Dairy Queen?

No-one tried to stone him to death; he died of natural causes. And as far as I can see, everyone has been able to express an opinion about Mr. Smith in his persona of the Frugal Gourmet, regardless of what they think about his private persona. I don't see an "attempt to degrade" here, just a good deal of praise for his Frugal Gourmet persona and a fair degree of concurrent negative remarks about aspects of his private persona.

Thanks, Lucy! We very much plan on attending a performance of real traditional Beijing Opera. I was unable to find any in 1987...

Ore, I just want to once again compliment you on this diary. I look forward to each new installment!

I'm not doing that! I'm just discussing the review per se. I have no idea how I'd react to V Steakhouse's cuisine.

Indeed.

Thanks, Boris. When were you last in Beijing? Have you ever been to the Northeast of China?

Yes, though I found out within the last couple of years. However, the offensive derivation may be a hoax.

They close at midnight; didn't you pay attention to the earlier part of the thread? Your co-workers like Aji-Sen, perhaps?

Exactly. And some sports personalities who were known for being "nice guys" eventually get arrested for beating their wives' heads in or committing rape. Etc. But we fans didn't know that side of their personalities, because it was their private side. So let's praise the Frugal Gourmet's worth as a TV personality, but let's not go overboard. Allowing ourselves some cognitive dissonance is salutary.

Thanks, Lucy. Would you believe he booked the Novotel Peace Beijing at 3 Jinyu Hutong WANGFUJING? We're staying in a French hotel in Beijing! Not my choice, but if that's what they want...

No. I liked the Frugal Gourmet I saw and heard on TV. I didn't know the person, and if he was a serial child molester in "real life," that's very abominable. So I didn't really know what to post, and until now had kept in mind something my grandmother used to say: "If you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all." That seems especially operative when a person has just died, but I don't feel right about critics of the late Frugal Gourmet being ganged-up on. We don't know a person just because we've watched him on TV. When I was a child, there used to be a TV show for children called Wonderama that was taped on Fridays and ran every Saturday morning (or was it Sunday?) on Metromedia Channel 5 in New York. They had lots of stuff to give away in exchange for mentioning the names of the products and companies on the air, so they had the kids do all kinds of games and races to select the lucky winners. I knew kids who skipped school on some Friday or other to be part of a Wonderama show, but I was too much of a goody two-shoes to do that (and my parents also thought that would have been a frivolous reason to skip school). The host was a man who dressed in a clown suit and he had a very funny and seemingly benevolent TV persona. He was later convicted on numerous counts of child molestation and sentenced to substantial jail time, as I recall . So by all means, praise the Frugal Gourmet you knew from TV, but don't assume he deserves to go to Heaven. P.S. I notice saultime said some of the same things much more pithily.

Why not, if it makes the dish worse than the sum of its parts, as Bruni seemed to think it did?

I agree with you, Mabelline. Using beef fat in "vegetarian" products is definitely "sue-worthy."