Pan

That's great, Maggie! Keep on truckin'!

How (and who, if you remember) was the band?

Did anyone take pictures?

When I'm not dining out by myself, I'm usually with friends or family. We tend to talk about the food and other places we've eaten lately or in the past, about our careers, and about most anything else that comes up or we want to talk about. Discussion often has something to do with some of the traditionally prohibited topics Jack posted above. (But really, are these traditionally prohibited for Ashkenazic Jews? I don't think so! But considering that discretion is the better part of valor, I'll let you imagine some traditional Ashkenazic conversations that cover such topics...) The only topics that I really tend to steer clear of are those that are likely to provoke a visceral reaction of nausea. But again, that's because these are meals with friends and family. I do behave differently in more formal gatherings with strangers and so forth.

Manisan/gula Melaka/palm sugar is fragrant and a bit smokey, in my experience (I remember the disks we used to get in the village). It tastes something like sorghum syrup and is comparable to but not quite as delicious or fragrant (sort of rich-tasting) as maple sugar (i.e., I would be careful about substituting maple sugar of any kind for palm sugar). I'm not sure what maltose tastes like by itself, but based on my experience in eating sweets made with it, I actually have the impression that it's subtler than palm sugar and lacks the smokey overtones. So, who has had both maltose and palm sugar by themselves? If you have, please give us your empirical comparisons.

I also have found that specials are on average more expensive than the average main dish/appetizer (whatever) price of items on the printed menu. I also have a strong dislike for specials recited without prices. I, too, always ask what a special's price is before ordering it. I do order specials, when they sound particularly interesting, which I think is usually a mark of creativity in the kitchen or/and the availability of particularly good products of a certain type. That said, at my local Polish-American diner, Teresa's, the specials are virtually all really everyday specials, except for the weekend brunch specials (which also generally recur every weekend), yet they write them on that one blackboard. The only exception I can think of off-hand is the Chicken Stew, which is sometimes left over from lunch. So I wonder why they don't just add them to the menu and save the staff some extra work. Maybe it's because they not too infrequently run out of specials like roast duck (which I ate tonight) and roast chicken, and some of the others. But I can't remember a time when spinach pierogies were unavailable there as a special.

If you want to know if Haagen Dazs makes a flavor, just check their website (linked to in the first post in this thread). John, the reason I mentioned artisanal gelato is that although I do agree that it's a different product from what I guess I could call regular (or, if you like, premium) American ice cream, it's similar enough for me to compare the two products and consider the gelato (i.e., such as I had in good gelaterie in Siena) far superior. But yes, Haagen-Dazs puts out a consistently good product, or rather, many consistently good products. And as for the flavors I don't like, that just means more containers of them are available to those who like them.

John, as you mention, it is indeed possible to get to the Meat-Packing District by subway. You can take the A, C, E, or L to 14th St. and 8th Av.; and the 1, 2, and 3 stop at 14th St. and 7th. You can also take the M14 crosstown, the M11 10th/9th-Av. bus, and the M20 8th Av./7th Av. bus. So depending on where you're coming from, transportation might be fine; it's just that the location is far west. The Meat-Packing District for the most part really isn't my scene, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea to call for it to be torched or talk about the people who frequent it as "garbage." Tell us what you really think, guys.

I guess I was operating on the misconception that you have to source (=locate or find, I thought) an item before you buy it. But as far as verbing nouns is concerned, some of you might spend a month or so on alt.usage.english (not longer, because too many of the subscribers are nuts!). You'll find that the regulars won't be sympathetic, and they will cite very early examples. And the fact is, there are loads and loads of English words that are both nouns and verbs -- and some are adjectives, too. Talk, spin, joke, chat, laugh, hit, cry, steal, rape, murder, love, mime, stone, drive, cruise, fly, buzz, stomach, gut, cut, fix, limit, loan, rule, play, etc., etc. -- including telegraph, which mizducky used above. So while some of these new nouns may bug you -- and some bug me, too -- there's really no grammatical or important historical reason for the objections. And for that matter, "object" is another example of a word that's both a noun and a verb...

You might be right about Chicago, but there isn't that much of an avant-garde presence in New York. Easily 99.99%+ of our restaurants are not avant-garde, and even if one restricts consideration to high-end restaurants, I suppose that depending on who you talk to, those in the avant-garde category may have doubled to two with the opening of Urena. In terms of a restaurant's standing among other people in a community, I'm not sure if I'm understanding your point correctly. I don't care much about how well a restaurant succeeds in a community if I don't think much of its cuisine -- unless I'm an investor. My opinion is not a popularity contest, though if it were, I'd be praising McDonalds, not a restaurant that charges $70 a head, or whatever Incanto charges. Now if any establishment deserves admiration for meeting its goals, surely McDonalds does. But does that make me admire the chain's food? Nope. I don't think that's offtopic for this thread at all. It goes to a question of criteria. Your argument about the lengths of growing seasons is well-reasoned, but I'm not sure that your conclusion actually follows from your argument. Lupa changes its menu with the seasons, as do many other New York restaurants. Do none of them in fact do as well as Incanto? Using what criteria? Yep, it comes back to criteria. To reiterate: I'm not arguing that Incanto is or is better or worse than any other restaurant; I've never been there! It may well be the greatest Italian restaurant on this side of the Atlantic for all I know. But to establish that, I'd have to compare it to other Italian restaurants. And my main criteria would likely be taste and price, with service and wine list also in the mix.

Well, would you consider Hearth and Lupa to also be so "vastly different" as to be uncomparable? I find Hearth and Lupa quite similar enough to compare them, specifying differences as well as commonalities between them. (For the record, I've been to Hearth once and Lupa several times and on that basis, I so far prefer Lupa, but not by much, and look forward to going back to both establishments -- with a slight edge in that respect to Hearth, because I've been there fewer times.) I'd like you to elaborate about the "class as a whole," though. How does one consider the position of a restaurant in its "class as a whole" and write appraisals on that basis that are useful to readers? (This is not a challenge to you, just a question.) [Edited for clarity.]

Susan, do whatever you have to do. If you take time off, we'll still be here when you come back. It's often been said that it's harder to quit cigarettes than heroin, yet many people quit every year, so give yourself a break when you struggle, but remember that it's been done many times before, so it really can be done. (I have no idea how that came across, but I hope it helped.)

I recently tried a new flavor: almond hazelnut swirl ice cream. It includes hazelnut paste and little almond bits, and it tastes like a kind of poor man's hazelnut gelato. Since I loved hazelnut gelato (usually cioccolato e nocciola) in Italy, I can enjoy this Haagen-Dazs flavor here. I also noticed an alluring new flavor on the Haagen-Dazs website: english toffee ice cream. I want some of that! Anyone tried it yet? I haven't seen it in stores so far.

On those narrow grounds, you're right that it's unlikely that a restaurant in New York would rate higher, but I don't think anyone is arguing that Lupa is a better California regional restaurant than Incanto. In terms of similar cuisines with different values, I would say that each of us has personal values related to our individual tastes. I care what the different values of different cuisines or chefs are only to the extent that they coincide with the bounds of my individual taste. In other words, I basically feel that if it's not good enough, the cook should shut up about his/her values and improve the performance of the kitchen, or simply continue without my patronage. And I'll give you another example: One could postulate that there is such a thing as "Malaysian-American" cuisine, whose values include a lack of hot pepper, excessive sweetness, gloppy sauces, similarity to poor-quality American-Chinese takeout...do you see where this is going? A pox on such values, says me! (Again, I'm using the extremes to make a point about criteria.)

Anyone know if there is or will be live music there? Seems natural, given the name, which unless I'm very much mistaken means "Cuban sound." Correct me if I'm wrong; my Italian and French are pretty good when in practice, but my Spanish is piggish. I noticed there's a menu up for them on menupages.com, but it doesn't list any prices. No prices are listed for normal menu items on their website, either. About how much can one expect to spend on appetizers, main dishes, and desserts?

So when you have Chinese food in the US, are you able to completely block out your awareness that the Chinese food you had in China was (presumably) generally a lot better? ← No. But instead of trying to compare all the Chinese food I eat in the U.S. to what I ate in China, I appreciate the Chinese food here for what it is. ← Right. But as you admitted, you do that while still being aware of what Chinese food in China is (or was) like. The comparison is there, even if you're doing well in suppressing it, so that you can enjoy what you're eating. Much like my approach toward appraising Malaysian restaurants in New York, I think.

I don't think I have, but why don't you repeat that question on the Lupa thread, so we can discuss it there.

I'd surmise that restaurants with "Kabul" in their name are concentrating on Kabuli cuisine, which would presumably be most influenced by the Pashtuns who constitute the majority in the region but, like most capital cities' cuisines, would also reflect various other influences from within and outside the country. The other Afghan restaurants I've been to don't strike me as highly dissimilar in their offerings from the Kabul Cafe, so I'm guessing that most of the Afghan refugees and immigrants who made it to this country are Pashtuns, and that most of the Afghan restaurants are serving primarily Pashtun food. If I'm right, Balkh Shish Kebab would be an exception. Balkh the hometown of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is a northern Afghan town, and also a province known in ancient times as Bactria, whose capital is Mazar-e-Sharif. Turkic peoples (Tajiks and Uzbeks) predominate in that area.

Side issue, but I don't think your parenthetical assumption is accurate. Many people travel for work, and others are able to afford discounted rount-trip tickets because they avoid hotel bills and stay with friends or relatives. I don't think that people who are homeless and starving are jet-setters, but one doesn't have to be a billionaire or even someone rich enough to be a regular at French Laundry to be able to travel a few times a year.

So when you have Chinese food in the US, are you able to completely block out your awareness that the Chinese food you had in China was (presumably) generally a lot better?

You may be able to figure it out, though, or at least interpret it. I certainly do analyze and judge a Mondrian using some different criteria from those I use for paintings by, say, Corot, because the artists are trying to do very different things (some of the differences are obvious and some require special knowledge to even be aware of). But maybe that's not a fair analogy, because Mondrian actually wrote descriptions of his intentions in painting. In which case, you can consider some paintings from Picasso's cubist periods or some other type of painting that's obviously different from traditional figurative works. Yes, this type of analysis can be helpful sometimes, and it's a damn sight more informative than "I like that painting; I hate that painting." That level of appraisal is based on naivete' So going back to our analogy, I think that we can pretty easily determine that a cheap Cantonese dim sum house and a 3-star Michelin French restaurant have pretty different intentions. Both may be great, but there will be clear differences in what they aspire to achieve.

Your reasoning is logical, Dave, but it's possible that lots of smokers and ex-smokers are attracted to this thread in particular. I'm not yet convinced that the proportion of smokers who are members here is actually greater than the proportion among the general population, though you may very well be right.

My sympathies, Julia! My main culinary memory of my mother's mother was her stuffed cabbage, which was remarkably like Jaymes' Russian Stuffed Cabbage Rolls, except that in addition to raisins, she also included prunes and possibly some other dried fruit I can't remember offhand (apricots?), and she used lemon juice instead of vinegar. I thought the ginger snaps were her personal secret trick, but I now know that wasn't the case. My mother still has Sylvia's recipe, and we've made it, but somehow, it just doesn't taste the same without a grandmother's love in it (and that's despite the fact that I believe my mother is in general a much better cook than her mother was). I called my father's mother Baba, as she came from an area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now about 200 miles inside of Ukraine (Baba is Ukranian for "Grandmother"). When I knew her, she was a diabetic, so I remember her eating dietetic cookies (e.g. Stella d'Oro) and such. But I also remember that she made compote that I liked very much. She also always seemed to have a stew in a pot on her stove. Baba was a tough, resourceful forest Jew with a green thumb, and she was very proud of the beautiful large plants she had induced to flourish all around her apartment. I don't think she was using any of them for food, though. I'm editing this post to add another paragraph, because I think it belongs. I had a third grandmother, a fictive one, Ethel Carr. I know I mentioned her in some similar thread (I think it was about people other than parents who influenced our taste or something). Mrs. Carr was a black Southerner who lived in Harlem back in the 70s and used to come once a week or so to do some cleaning in the apartment. She also often babysat me (she was a good block-player ). As I remember, she never arrived emptyhanded, but always or at least often came with delicious Southern foods. I especially remember the sweets: The apple cobbler, the sweet potato pie, the shortbread, the peach cobbler, the pumpkin pie, the apple pie, the peach pie, the bread pudding, etc. But I also seem to remember collard greens, for example, and candied yams. When Mrs. Carr was too old to work for my parents, my mother had a fellowship that paid for child care among other things, and she used to send a check every month to Mrs. Carr for her upkeep. So Mrs. Carr really was in no way just an employee, but a beloved fictive relative. It's through her that I acquired a taste for soul food and an association of such foods with love and happy times.

I ate at Cacio e Pepe recently. My dinner there with a friend did indeed cost more than that same friend paid for a dinner at Lupa the following night, and the food, though solid, was certainly not comparable to Lupa's. I believe it was just over $120 plus for two dinners with some amount of wine that time at Cacio e Pepe.

Ingrid, you asked a very good question that I don't consider rhetorical: "How do you decide whether an Istrian restaurant trumps a Roman one?" I think it is clearly possible to make such a decision -- for example, along the lines I indicated above (especially price vs. perceived value). Are you suggesting that it's impossible to compare the quality of a particular Roman restaurant with the quality of a particular Istrian restaurant and find the one or the other wanting? Do you never make any such comparisons? What are your criteria for evaluating and comparing restaurants? Supposing you were comparing an Inuit restaurant that served seal blubber with a restaurant with specialties more to your liking... I think that if we really want to establish the bases of our judgments on food, we have to consider the extreme cases as well as the closer ones. Surely, we all compare and contrast things that are similar as well as things that are wildly different, no?