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I walk past the place all the time. It was still there as of a couple of days ago. No, I've never eaten there.

I don't think that dropping a class in which people get exercise is going to be good for people's health. Do you mean that you're favoring garden-variety Phys Ed over competitive sports?

I have yet to read the linked article, but I have a preliminary thought: Without prejudice to this particular example of people putting themselves in other people's shoes (albeit temporarily), I don't share generalized negativity about this. Naturally, if you can leave at any time, you're not trapped in the situation, but that doesn't mean that you can't gain some kind of insight into what it's like. Will you? Maybe, maybe not, but I can't see that not trying to put yourself in someone's shoes is a better alternative.

I think about things like that. And highway dynamics too. Why does the LIE come to a near stop at points when there is no obvious cause? I think there are a few people around that get paid to think of answers to questions like that. Yes, there are. Engineering schools like Polytechnic University give Ph.D.'s in Traffic Engineering. And now, back to our show...

I would tend to say "gree-v'-lakh," like my parents do (except that people have trouble understanding what I'm talking about) and spell it grivelach. I've heard people pronounce gribenes "gri ["i" as in "fish"] - b' - ness."

Those sound like dubious sources to me. Some tourist from a small town could have posted them. For what it's worth, the one time I went to Luger's, I took the J there and walked back home across the Williamsburg Bridge. Nary a problem, and fun.

I think I'll start a thread on art in restaurants on the General Topics board. There's a lot we could talk about. [Edit: here's the thread.] Yes, I think that sculptures of mutilated instruments are usually pretty objectionable. Well, unless they're Bundys. (Explanation: Bundy is a company that makes bargain-basement wind instruments, and their name is generally considered synonymous with "crap.")

Adam, you're right that my comment is a tangent, but it's relevant to your remark about "modern cultures." If you meant to discuss modern royal families only, you could have. Shall we agree to move on, then, and leave this thread to focus on the food of the European Medieval elite? (By the way, yes, I do have some idea what the Terengganu court was eating because my mother bought a cookbook that professed to include [all the?] recipes of the royal chef. But I don't think this is the thread in which to pursue those.)

You're welcome, Unagi, and I look forward to more posts from you. But please elaborate on the basis or time frame of Williamsburg being considered an unsafe neighborhood. I know that it used to be considered dicey, but so did Times Square and the East Village, in fairly recent memory (10-20 years ago, essentially), and I'd argue that neither is dangerous nowadays. I wonder if anyone else thinks Williamsburg is so dangerous nowadays that it's a real risk to walk to the subway there. Perhaps so, given that Luger's runs a car service.

I haven't had kreplach in a restaurant that I can remember, nor grivelach (my parents' pronunciation of "gribenes"). But is "ptcha" your pronunciation of shchav (the sheep sorrel drink)?

Neither were Malay villagers in rural Terengganu in the 1970s, yet their use of spices helped cover the off taste of unrefrigerated day-old chicken and fish. I think 1970s classifies as "modern," don't you? (Of course, all of this is without prejudice to the question of Medieval European practices.)

To really judge the artwork, I'll have to get a closer look, but from the photos, it looks like understated "background artwork" (by analogy with background music). I have no idea what the artwork at ADNY is, of course. Once upon a time, the Boteros at Jo Jo were our only complaint about the place. In particular, my father (the painter in the family) wanted a seat where he couldn't see them. Sorry for going off on a tangent.

It could be argued that you're going beyond the call of duty. Do you ascertain how the customer feels by asking, as in "I see you didn't eat much of that. I take it you didn't like it?"?

Welcome to eGullet, Unagi2000. I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But this is the only part of your post that I found dubious. You don't "have to" pay for a cab to Luger or a car service back. The J and M trains run right past the place.

Very well stated, ExtraMSG. "Good" food, like "good" music, "good" paintings, and "good" timepieces, is a matter of taste and not a moral question. And when you bring in art, there's an awful lot of art that's considered just great in art establishment circles that I think is crap. But that's not a moral issue, either.

No apologies needed, Brooks! You gave a good answer! It's depressing to hear that lunchroom food is bad even in Louisiana. But frankly, when I was growing up in New York in the 70s, lunchroom food was not good anywhere I went to school - public elementary school, private elementary school (somewhat better but not good), college, grad school. There was one sleepaway camp with decent food, but nothing compared to what my mother cooked, until I got the chance to cook for myself and started learning some basic concepts such as not to boil broccoli with the chicken. By the time I was in grad school, I was a fairly decent cook. Perhaps it's a shame that I seldom cook anymore, but I'm going off topic again...

Yeah, it does. Thank you.

Thanks for the meal report, Suzanne. I'm glad you had a great meal and have a couple of tangential questions: Could you describe the art a little more? (I'm wondering if I'd find it tasteful.) Also, are there some dishes that are robustly spiced? I rarely complain about "gratuitous" spicing in Indian dishes.

Probably because we pay much more on health care, and presumably education, and get less generous social welfare benefits of all kinds. Yet our health care and educational systems are failing your children. I have no children. But otherwise, you'll get no argument here. To keep this on-topic, however, I'd like to know to what extent corporations are involved in the delivery of food in school lunchrooms in Europe and how good the food is in various European countries. Perhaps that should be another thread though, come to think of it...

Count me among the "many." The thing I most need from a clock (I actually don't wear watches) is reliability. Oversleeping for a concert or a class I'm supposed to teach, just because my clock stopped or won't ring, is a nightmare. I don't think that "less-reliable watches with soul" make a good analogy with food-buying patterns. I doubt that any of us are looking for unreliable or highly inconsistent food purveyors. Are you?

Tonight, after a friend and I saw a concert (great concert of Music from Marlboro at Washington Irving High School which is being repeated on Friday at the Metropolitan Museum), we had the idea of going to a restaurant that normally would be hard to get into on a Saturday night. Our first stop was Il Bagatto, which was as crowded as usual in spite of the continuing heavy snowfall - 20- to 30-minute wait for a room downstairs! So we went to Lavagna. It was my friend's first time, and she was impressed. She liked the location, with a lovely view into a snow-bound garden. We started off by sharing my favorite appetizer, the Carcioffi al Forno, which was as good as always. Both of us skipped primi and ordered secondi. My friend ordered the pork chops, which she was delighted with. They seemed to me an adaptation of Austrian pork with red cabbage - definitely not what I'd call an Italian dish. The dish was good though a little too salty to be optimum for me. [Edit to add that there were also delicious slices of butternut squash in this dish.] My main dish was a special - venison, rare and already sliced for me, on top of polenta, with a few halves of brussels sprouts and a inverted miniature casseroleful of garlic flan. The venison was just a little gristly, but otherwise, the dish was great in all particulars. Again, I wouldn't call this an Italian dish, but more a sort of nouvelle cuisine dish. Both of us were happy with the wines by the glass that we got. My friend got Malbec, a good fruity wine. I asked for a recommendation and chose a Southern Italian wine that was described as full-bodied and a bit spicy. It had interesting complexity, though some of the taste seemed to be from oak barrels. Anyway, it pleased me. I can't remember its name - something like Amara (but that can't be, as it means "bitter"). For dessert, we got wine and biscotti (to be precise, we got one order of wine and biscotti and got another glass of wine for $5). I was expecting Vin Santo and was surprised (though if anything pleasantly) that the wine was sweet and tasted like Muscat wine. Again, it was called something else and was fizzy (Sicilian, I think). The biscotti and butter cookies were excellent. My friend said we wouldn't have had a better dinner at Il Bagatto, and I agreed. I think it would have been equally good but different. We ended up being their last customers, but they didn't rush us out, and service was pleasant as usual. One especially nice thing was when they put an empty table next to us and moved the bread onto that table to give us more room. We left an appropriately generous tip. The bill was just under $74 including tax, and we left $90.

That's a civil liberties issue, though, not a step toward prohibiting the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages.

You make an important point, Fat Guy. Hypermarches in France are great. This is probably even more true of the Supermercati in Italy. Fresh, vine-ripened fruit, good local wines, fine jarred products of the type that would be available only in gourmet stores in much of the U.S.

I spent 10 days in QC in the summer of 1996, and in restaurants, the only place where the bread was decent was a Greek place in Montreal. The Quebecois restaurants served good food (a little heavy) but awful bread in both Quebec and Montreal. I've never had bad bread in any restaurant I can remember going to in Italy, but I've never been further north than Tuscany and Umbria.

Yeah, tell us more! Did the seduction work?