Pan

You guess that people who are not simply schoolyard bullies but incarcerated happily share their calories? Yeah, right. Sure you do.

I feel like Asimov does a good job on $25-and-under, though I have to admit I haven't been to lots and lots of the places he's reviewed, such that I could say I've really checked on how accurate his reviews seemed to me. But he's an excellent writer, in any case, and someone who I think clearly loves food. He didn't want the job?

That's a hotel/casino, isn't it? So gambling would be another reason.

I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not like it, Sam-I-Am! (No, I've never read the cookbook. How do you make the eggs green? Cilantro sauce?)

Thanks for posting that. It was interesting.

Who's going to picket meat-packing plants, GS? And how does anyone know what's happening in them if they bar people from visiting their premises?

I frankly don't know. Who?

I think it's cultural. As a child, I travelled with my parents to parts of the U.S. (New England, etc.), Canada, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore (where the hotel was weird and insisted that I stay in a separate room as a 12-year-old - which my parents thought was a weird morals clause but I thought was just a grift to make more money), Indonesia, India, Israel, Greece, and Spain. Some of those hotel rooms were pretty rudimentary.

Why does the song "Ring of Fire" come to mind here? Well, suffice it to say we thought they were crazy and never once considered making this dish! Other recipes in that cookbook are terrific, but I think my father always uses a quarter of the amount of peppers called for, and the dishes are still solidly hot that way.

The government can benefit by human foibles in several ways, but the most pertinent to eGullet is "sin taxing" of various addictive things including liquor.

I'm shocked to find out that hotels in Britain won't let families with children stay there. As an American, that idea is completely foreign to me. Offhand, I've never heard of any other country where forbidding children to stay in hotels is common. Actually, I don't think I've ever heard of or even considered such a thing, except that perhaps hotels that are primarily places for sex might exclude children because it's inappropriate for them to be there.

I bought my father a cookbook printed in India for Indians, I believe of Keralese cooking. The dishes typically call for large quantities of those really hot little green peppers. But one really takes the cake: A hot chili curry, with chili as the vegetable! The recipe called for something like 20 little red peppers and 13 little green peppers, plus assorted spices you might normally expect in a curry.

I can tell you that when I've asked people from Bangkok to make the food the way they like it and they've really believed me, it was almost inedibly hot - though I have to admit that I don't remember having trouble eating Thai food when I was in Bangkok. But I think the point is that there are regional variations in spiciness within Thailand.

Good. Now, more importantly, Naomi, you might want to post a copy of that on the United Kingdom and Ireland forum, where you're probably more likely to save people what could be a very unpleasant trip to this establishment. The one caution I'd make is that, since you have no actual proof that this was food poisoning, I'd counsel you to describe symptoms rather than stating flat out that your father and brother suffered from food poisoning (or state that they suffered from what seemed to you to be food poisoning). The symptoms are inarguable; the interpretation of food poisoning is logical, as you state, but you have no proof of it and therefore could possibly get in trouble for making that accusation directly. I know it sounds like I'm being ridiculously nitpicky, but lawyers assert that the mere accusation of food poisoning can be held libelous. And this is where the eGullet policy bilrus referred to comes down.

Irwin and Linda: Hotter than Thailand??? Wow, I'd have to experience that!

Thanks for pointing us to your signature, which is very funny, and thanks for sharing that information.

Personally, I hardly ever drink beer. But why do you counsel against it? It's very common for people to drink beer with Thai or Indian food, for example.

More like the conductor, and maybe the concertmaster and assistant concertmaster, but otherwise nobody but ringers in the orchestra, no regulars.

Doesn't sound weird to me.

You're kidding? They sell waterbugs (huge cockroaches) for eating, with the approval of the Department of Health? Wouldn't dead cockroaches in a store normally cause it to fail inspection in the U.S.?

Louisa, I didn't realize you had spent time in great kitchens in China.

And actually?

Thanks for the link. Seems like he's calling for much stronger government regulations, not deregulation:

Ugh!

I think you win!