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Suzanne: What time of day do you envision this taking place?

A case in point is that fennel is expensive in stores in San Francisco even though it grows all over the area as a weed, and it doesn't seem like anyone is actually using it. (Or at least, that was the case a few years ago.)

I think it was Frusen Gladje. Do you remember the Ben and Jerry's commercial, "There ain't no Haagen, there ain't no Dazs. There ain't no Frusen, there ain't no Gladje..."?

Well, hopefully we'll know more after you have a chance to dine there.

And of course, the tips of young ginger roots are pink without being pickled.

The USDA has a problem with bugs in a chicken coop??? What are they thinking here? As for the beaks, chickens peck one another. "Pecking order" is an idiom. If the hens are too close together, give 'em more space! But a manure-covered slab of concrete sounds fine for chickens. It's the crowding that sounds like a problem. Like most other animals, chickens need some space. They are social creatures who chase one another and, less commonly, like to hang out together. I have to say that it bothers me that I eat a lot of meat that comes from animals kept in such awful conditions.

Thanks for the info, lafcadio. I'll be sure to check this place out.

You're supposed to eat the rice?? In fact, when dining out or in a home as guests, Chinese typically do NOT eat rice. It's a face thing, because you fear signaling that you are too poor/cheap to provide enough dishes to satisfy a hunger, or that your host has not done the same. I follow your logic, but I've never noticed the behavior. Whenever I've dined with Chinese people or observed them at banquets, they've always eaten rice.

Do you decrease your chances of dying of all those other things by eating beef? I doubt it.

Those are labels. Please consider defining them for the purpose of this thread and explaining why you believe the statement you made. I do think Epicureanism is different from the other two words, because it was originally associated with a philosophy that makes indulgence central to life, and in that sense, Epicureanism really does seem to me to violate fundamental religious tenets of various faiths. But I don't understand your points on the other two terms.

If a bizarre experience with a sandwich isn't worth talking about here, is anything else we talk about worth talking about. I mean, it's all just food and drink, right?

Cattle oil = tallow, I guess.

I don't think of scum as foam, but as a layer of protein combined with fat that forms a thin film on top of soup.

Someone was engaging in idle speculation, I'd figure. For now, Burros is the critic. Who will replace her is something I figure no-one knows.

I drink a red tea every day: Hibiscus. I happen to hate rose hips and find that they hurt my throat. Chacun a son gout. Stay warm tonight!

I think the polite word for the "scum" of a soup is "skin." I've heard it used, anyway.

Hillvalley, have you tried drinking peppermint tea when you can't sleep? Coincidentally, I just drank some chamomile tea, but I drink it to calm the stomach, whereas I drink peppermint tea for various reasons, including sometimes just for pleasure. It does help me when I'm overtired and want to either get up or mellow off and go to sleep.

I like the fortune cookies with Chinese words on the flip side. I think I must have mentioned this somewhere, but my alltime favorite fortune cookie fortune is "If you need advice, call your mother." I called my mother and told her that fortune, and we both had a good laugh about it.

What do they do, yank the beak off the bird? So she can't peck them when they steal her eggs that she wants to protect and roost on? That was unnecessary in my experience of free-range organic farming. My neighbor in the Malay village owned a bunch of chickens - umpteen hens and one rooster. Most of the time, one or another of her hens was laying eggs. All you had to do was pick the hen up and take a few of her eggs. As long as there were some eggs left for the hen to roost on, she complained but dealt with it. I think that if anyone took all the eggs, the hen would have panicked, and I guess that's what they have to deal with in those egg farms.

Are bell peppers really cheap in the U.S., and is that why they are used so often (and mentioned so seldom in the menu) in Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese restaurants in the U.S.? I wish they'd stop!

By far the best chickens I've ever had were free-range village chickens in Malaysia.

I didn't mean to split hairs, Soba. I guess I don't know much about how newspapers and reporters pick feature stories. There have been stories in previous years about the East Village as a place replete with sushi bars, but this is definitely taking things to another level and I do agree that what's happened in the last couple of years is relevant.

Beautiful article, Varmint. I have to admit, while it was tough for me to be an ear-witness for slaughters of chickens when I was in Malaysia (tougher when I watched them run with their throats slit), I had no compunction at all to eat the fish I caught when I had beginners luck the first time I tried. I just don't relate to fish on the same level as animals that walk on land and can scream. In rural Malaysia, you needed no license to fish with an improvised nylon line attached to a piece of driftwood, a little hook on the other end, and snail guts for bait. That fish was good, but I never caught another fish for the remaining two years I was in that village. Fishing with my neighbors was always fun, though. Talk about a real Huck Finn scene! My mother even wrote an article for Science Digest once called "Huckleberry Finn in Malaysia" or some such, about the fishing expeditions of my friends and me. Of course, I was her consultant for the article.

Frankly, I don't think that running around a coop is all that humane, either. The father of the young woman who was my girlfriend when I was living in Malaysia used to run a chicken coop for a businessman whose headquarters were in the capital of the state. Those chickens were all together in that crowded coop all the time and never had the experience of running around outside. Pak Cik Din (the father) gave me a young chicken as a present once. Like all the other chickens in the coop, it had all white feathers. It looked too old to be a chick anymore, but the poor little chicken thought I was its mother, followed me everywhere, and wanted to sleep with me in my bed (I put it in the coop instead, a coop that was just for the chickens to sleep in at night). I tried to show the little chicken how to scratch the earth, but I'm not a chicken and wasn't eating anything I dug up, so of course I failed and the poor thing died within a few days, despite our best efforts to feed it (like all our neighbors, we fed our chickens and all the other local chickens raw rice every day). I'm not sure whether I was right in figuring that part of the reason the little chicken simply couldn't fend for itself was that it had spent too much time living in a coop where its feed was given to it and it couldn't do anything and had nothing to do, but I do think that the chickens who never have a chance to roam around outside have a rather stunted and pathetic life. Hooking them up to a conveyor belt all the time would just be a further level of cruelty. But yes, I definitely feel that feeding chickens nothing but grain is abusive. Sorry if I digressed too much.

A further thought: If you or a friend of yours were opening a Burmese restaurant, what do you think would be the most effective way to present and sell the cuisine here?