Pan

I'm surprised I have yet to add Spicy & Tasty to this thread. It is simply a superb Sichuan-style restaurant with a wide variety of dishes on offer, including an unusually large selection of cold dishes. And it has an advantage over Grand Sichuan in that no menu space is wasted with "American-Chinese" dishes and such-like: You get the real stuff here, no ifs, ands, or buts (as far as I can tell). Asimov gave the restaurant a nice review in the April 21, 2004 Times, so more non-Chinese people have begun to check the place out. Reservations are highly recommended at peak times (which includes dinner on any day). Have a look at the thread on Spicy & Tasty for more details.

The decor may not be a Michelangelo fresco or something, but at least the place is light and they try to keep it reasonably clean. Plus, the service is efficient and fairly friendly. Remember St. Mark's Pizza? Dirty, dark, dingy, service with an attitude. Good riddance. P.S. I had a very nice felafel sandwich there tonight. I'm really glad we have Chickpea now. It's better than Dima was, and that was the last Middle Eastern place in the East Village that I went to regularly (I'm not counting sit-down restaurants like Cafe Mogador). I'll spare a thought for the former proprietor of Dima and his family: I saw them when they were tidying up for their move back to Syria. I hope that move was good for their fortunes and spirits. But now we have Israelis feeding us.

Oh, I should mention that actually, the felafel sandwich is a lot cheaper than the shawarma or shawafel sandwiches. It's $2.95 + tax, whereas the others are I think $4.50ish + tax.

Thanks, Craig.

Sounds worth a try.

Thanks.

La Bamba? Seriously, what is "bamba"?

No, not that often.

So another question: In places where you can get wine by the carafe, is that usually poured from full bottles? I figure so, but considering how little I know about this stuff...

What's a khalasi?

So half-bottles aren't simply whole bottles that were opened and divided in half at the restaurant. As they say, you learn a new thing every day...

Hmmm... might not be the one I'm thinking of, which I've always heard told in an exaggerated Brooklyn-Italian accent as an exchange between a grocer and an insistent customer. Funny how sometimes folk and/or immigrant humor can become completely ethnically-interchangeable (Italian/Jewish, Polish/Belgian etc.) - just as many viola jokes (NOT, however, my very favorite one of all) can be "transposed" for tuba or saxophone or accordion.... Yeah, and Polish jokes are told about Portuguese in parts of Massachusetts, and about "Newfies" in Canada, etc. And in the jazz world, many "viola" jokes are told about bassists. I can't imagine this tale told as an exchange between a grocer and a customer, though. The tale is a little long, though, and might be best told over drinks some day...

I frankly don't understand why half-bottles are so uncommon in restaurants, so I posted a thread on half-bottles on the Wine Forum. I'm quite ignorant about the issues involved in deciding to provide half-bottles or decline to provide them, and I encourage your participation in the new thread, if you're interested.

In a thread about a New York restaurant called Landmarc that makes many half-bottles available, oakapple made the following post: In response, I'd like to ask a series of frankly ignorant questions, so that you all can teach me a thing or two about the way the wine service in restaurants works, and what considerations they deal with. If you sell a more or less even number of half-bottles, all you have to do is distribute the contents of x bottles of wine evenly between 2x customers, right? Then, the only other cost is the labor involved in opening the bottles and pouring them, right? (Well, and storing the half-bottles, as I'll discuss later.) But the same labor that would be expended in opening a bottle for one order is now distributed between two orders, exclusive of pouring the wine into a carafe or something. So is there really anything non-simple about providing half bottles of popular wines in a restaurant? OK, perhaps the wines probably have to be popular enough not to be stored outside of the bottle for a long time, but that seems to be the only drawback?? I just don't get it. Is there really any significant problem, other than that restaurants may feel that making half-bottles (or, indeed, wines by the glass, I suppose) available will decrease their sales of whole bottles?

Considering that people have been cooking all over the world for over 100,000 years (and that's a very conservative number), the idea that you'd find a "primitive" tribe that doesn't cook anything - well, if they don't cook anything, it would have to be a matter of taste, not being over 100,000 years "behind" the rest of the human race. Please, let's be careful about cultural-evolutionist language.

Did I already mention that I love the smell I get when I enter a good Indian spice store? The combined fragrance of cumin, cardamom, coriander, cinammon, cloves, etc., etc. MMMMMMM!

If you're not following the references, those dried sweet potatoes (there are two varieties) are used mostly in the more tonic type of soups, which are brewed up more for their healthful qualities then taste. Thanks, Trillium. Of course, I meant to say "I can't see the merit in them," and I just edited my original post and the quote here to reflect that. Why do they use dehydrated instead of fresh sweet potato for those soups? And are such soups really common in home cooking?

Sometimes, it's best to just figure that you don't get it - whatever "it" is. Incontestably, there's nothing there for you, and nothing to "get." But to explain why I like it is pretty difficult, because you taste the same thing with a different palate. Sorry if perhaps I'm pointing out the obvious. But yes, it does have both a texture and a taste to me, a wonderful taste.

Louisa: Sorry to go on a tangent, but what happened to the stage at El Bulli? You got a real paying job instead? That would be a cause for celebration, indeed!

That's a really well-written piece. I think this is my favorite sentence: Also, your discourse on acquavite d'uva was really interesting. I've never heard of that. I guess it's best categorized as a grape liqueur. Is there anything else I might have already tried that might be somewhat similar to acquavite d'uva in flavor?

Lisa, in my family, the term "a krepel" stands for anything that anyone is phobic about, and I tell my students basically the same story you posted. That story wasn't made up for the cartoon, was it? I think of it as an old East European Jewish story. If it isn't, I should change my attribution... Say, the story about the seaman with the onions who was shipwrecked on an island with a fierce king - is that a story from the "Old Country," or was that made up for a comic strip? You know the story?

Today's New York Newsday has an "Interactive look at Fulton Market's move to Bronx." It's first under "Special Packages," toward the bottom of the page that will open when you click the link above.

I'm not fluent, anyway, just someone who struggled with rudimentary Hungarian while in Budapest for two weeks. I ate very well there, by the way, but that's off-topic for this thread.

You think Japanese is hard for pronunciation of short and long vowels? Try Hungarian...

[i welcome corrections of misimpressions or outdated things I may be picking based on stereotypes! ] Quebec to me would be maple syrup, and I'd also give that to Vermont. Malaysia: Durian, rambutan, belacan...that's 3 ingredients...I guess if I'm choosing, it'll be rambutan. Oh, and should I restrict that to the East Coast? I guess Brazil is coffee. Colombia, too, if we're only including foodstuffs. Tuscany: Another tough one to pick, because of its agricultural richness, but Chianti wine comes to mind. Galicia, Spain: Pulpo And here's an odd one: Nice: Lavendar (grows wild and smells so delicious!) This is harder than I thought it would be. Jamaica: Rum Cuba: Sugar cane Philippines: Pineapples Sudan: Gum Arabic Saudi Arabia: Dates Iran: Pistachios Spain: The first thing I think of is saffron, but I forget what region it grows in. Hungary: Paprika Sweden: Pickled herring (um, is that an ingredient or a dish?) Russia: Vodka Mexico: Corn Aren't word-association games fun?