babka

I really, really like Lalibela....but you do have to order what the eritreans are ordering in between the bottomless cups of tea. so yes to the lamb. and that would be a yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes to the lamb. and no to the vegetarian plate. or the spaghetti. edit b/c I can't spell

pennyroyal tea makes your uterine muscles contract, which should do the trick. your local health food store should have it, either as is or in a femmy mix of some sort. should go without saying, but if you don't see the tea, don't even _think_ about messing with the oil.

cafe atlantico's "dim sum" brunch. fantastic food, lots of plates, kids will love it, adults will love it, and you won't eat again for two days.

one! I took one! er. two, but one of them's on kitchen stove duty. hate playing with explosive gas and cardboard.

but they _have_ matchboxes--I built a whole castle out of 'em! You just have dig through the matchbooks to get to the cool square ones.

had to pick something up downtown today and oh! Matchbox! nothing to add to the above, except that the bartender, Nicole, was the coolest bartender on record, and somebody there needs to get her a sharp knife. She was wedging a dull blade through umpteen mangos and piling them in a pretty jar with vodka for an upcoming round.... also, had forgotten how much fun lincoln logs could be to play with, but the Matchbox matches reminded me (and thoroughly distracted me from my intended reading...:).

a bunch was way too strong--sorry. but I've only ordered delivery from three restaurants, all free, and they're all three listed in a la carte for fee: Spices, Meskereem, and Saigonnais. so not sure about the others, but I'd definitely call a restaurant directly before forking $4 to $8 over to a colorblind website.

so many ideas--thanks! Is Kantouri Fried Chicken that good? two more additions--Saigonnais in Adams Morgan delivers, and Yanyu delivers through a la carte express, but you might want to call the restaurant directly--a bunch of places listed in a la carte express deliver independently for free. as for me....I realized I'd already finished all _three_ of the water gallons I brought home last night so risked melting away and shuffled down the street for pupusas, cabbage, and a couple more gallons.

I've spent three days crashing on deadlines, with more to come, and I cannot cannot cannot stomach another omelet. But I also can't rationalize the time it would take to leave this barren hut and gather food from the vasty deep. Who delivers in D.C.? Besides Meskereem?

welcome on board baltimoreans!!!

Sacre bleu, I'm scratchin' my head and feeling ignorant at not being able to figure it out....may I ask what your religion is?

dansko. dansko. dansko. after padding barefoot around the apartment for a few hours, I'll put on a pair of danskos to save my poor betrodden feet. I've got crazy-high arches, and danskos remember the shape of my foot like nuttin' I've ever seen.

they're gorgeous and I'm hungry now, but may I ask about the occasion of inspiration?

ah, c'mon--there's not another lawyer turned baker in the city who can compete with the Cake Love man for looks. oh wait...the food's supposed to inspire the drool? actually, cjsadler, I suspect you were there on an off-day. I think the cupcakes are always pretty wretched--dry and tooth-hurting sweet, bad combination. But my new saturday morning addiction of a crunchy foot, really awful espresso, and the paper is pretty satisfying--the little bundt cakes I've had have been uniformly moist and cooked with a comparatively light hand on the sugar.

devoured half the bacon cheeseburger with crispy juicy bits flying everywhere in 3 minutes solid....and that'd be my calories for the next 24 hours and my waist will be just fine. but can someone explain this boardwalk fries thing? clearly there's a well-founded infatuation with 'em that I'm just not getting--what's the attraction in limp potatoes, direct from Idaho, soaked in grease? A couple of fries and I switched the malt vinegar and salt combo over onto lettuce bits and was much the happier for it.

My roommate's girfriend is visiting from Nebraska. Last night, once she'd left the room, I asked where he was taking her for her birthday. Oh! he was proud of himself, and said, with a grin on his face, "That place you told me about! The one with all the courses and the cool menu!" "Atlantico minibar?" "Yeah." "Tomorrow?" "Yeah!" "Do you have a reservation?" "No." so, um, thanks Palena for having a table open after 9.30....

rich yogurt with a pool of honey. something flaky or crunchy, too, but only if there are guests involved.

the 12th and Penn festivals are wierd, but one of the more amusing switches takes place during the Thai festival, which I've stumbled on two years running. Thai and Vietnamese vendors tend to run the food stands at all the ethnic/neighborhood festivals, and they show up in force at the Thai one, too, where they are supplemented by...salvadorans. but the Thai fest is the only street fair I'd recommend--long lines and wierd flat chicken and noodles in the front of the booths, with pretty good fantastic Thai street food in the back of the booths.

DonRocks, you have a gift for eloquent provocation. More than once, I've been tempted to follow in your ranted footsteps for the sheer pleasure of such a maladroit experience, only to realize that, more than likely, my time at said bar or restaurant would simply suck. here, however, I'm either missing you entirely, or you're being more eloquent than provocative. The good Mr. Klc makes the mouth explode with...pop rocks. Chefs, at times, use...ketchup. (vinegar, salt, and sugar...what could be better? besides butter.) Conventional watermelons may suck....or they may, properly chilled and shredded at an outdoor table with a pen-knife reach heights unheard of in the kitchen. especially if ouzo's involved. I don't think I've had the pleasures of Miracle Whip, but I do make my aioli with bottled mayonnaise, if I'm short on time or cooking for myself. you're making two points here, I think, and I agree wholeheartedly with the second while not following the first. Good food is good food--makes your mouth and stomach happy, gives you a good story quite independent of any conventional wisdom about it, and will hold up to variations a few times. Good cooking makes good food, sometimes. But sometimes my definition of good cooking is just learning something about the dynamics of chemistry and flavor. And sometimes my definition of good cooking is taking reasonable food and making it look beautiful--when a restaurant embeds the world's most perfect oysters in a wholly unnecessary green cucumber sauce that makes the oysters pop off the plate, while distracting the taste, is that a "cunning manipulation"? or "flawed but honest?" When a place presents its malanga puree with plaintain chips that sog by virtue of their position but make the dish more apparently appetizing than baby food, is that a cunning manipulation again? I'm going on visuals here because I don't have access to the shortcuts for anything else. But from that logic, when a chef uses miracle whip, balanced out with the appropriate fat, acid, or salt, to achieve a given consistency and/or flavor in a dish, and she achieves that flavor, per the unknowing diner, is that _really_ a cunning manipulation? or a possibly-flawed-but-the-chemistry's-the-same presentation? Maybe the strata wouldn't have held up to another tasting--maybe that etheral flavor, good for a few bites, would have decayed to a cloying sensation in larger quantities. But that, I would argue, is the result of poor cooking (or a too-large-dish), and not an inherent flaw in the miracle whip.

what _do_ pomelo cells taste like?

haven't figured out how to quote multiple posts, so hang on here: bux: Mags: I sorta meant the depression that my grandfather, and the grandparents of my childhood friends, all grew up in, which had some damn-long-lasting impacts on our family's restaurant habits. But in looking at the references to the "amateur" dining that takes place on holidays and the slow challenge of independents to chains outside of NYC, and comparing it to the little that I know of European and Latin American dining, and the _nothing_ that I know of Asian or African dining, I end up wondering if the Depression 'broke' a cultural practice of eating out outside of the big cities, or if it simply withered naturally in more rural areas. In Europe, Latin America, and NYC [being my only points of reference here] nearly all restaurants seem to be an outpost of the home, subject to the same furious debates and discussions. In the midwest and, as far as I know, the rural south, (I'm from Iowa, though half my family's from Chicago originally), 'expensive' restaurants are an occasional occasion, justifiable only through frugal selections and, well, special occasions. Maybe it was the same in NYC during rough times and ya'all just bounced back faster, thanks to density/social compression identification/all the other good factors identified in this tread.

good summary point. I'm dating a new yorker, and the first time he asked about my dinner plans a month ahead of time, I thought he was completely nuts. now I just think it's wierd.

lots of good points throughout here that I'm chewing over...many thanks. re: coverage, though-- Could the NYT do more and better? yes. But looks to me like it's already operating in a world quite different from most of the rest of the country's food coverage, which, as discussed eons ago in the CJR food porn thread, still operates as the harried housewife's column without the housewives. The de facto leap in most food and restaurant articles today is either towards saving time or towards novelty. In the Times, I think the de facto leaps tilt towards culture and method/science. Restaurants have histories in its pages, and the development of dishes/NYC cuisine can be traced from chef to chef. Even time-saving recipes, like Bittman's, or novelty columns, like in the magazine, frequently draw their actual content less from shortcuts and trends and more from traditions/stories/methods of preparation that happen to sound quick or novel now. Doesn't that function as some sort of mirror for the restaurants and foods ya'all know and discuss? Or are they still way off-base? Zagat's schmats--it's a more useful yellowpages, and I'd like to think that it's treated as such. Please don't disillusion me. fat guy, I think "thought" pieces are hard to pitch in any environment (until and unless you've got a pulitzer, in which case you're probably okay). In my world, it's much easier to pitch a "facts/trends/change" piece, get it accepted, and then, um, happen to leap off into the thought rhealm from those facts. For me, after some struggles, that's actually turned out to be a useful discipline....but I'm not working anywhere near the food-writing world.

I was thinking less along the lines of obsession and more along the lines of a grand, ongoing school, but however you say tomata... at the base of it, I'm seeing restaurants as a source of food for the tongue and the brain, and I'm trying to figure out how the latter got so thoroughly wedged in there. A friend once hypothesized that it had something to do with the minescule size of NYC apartments--difficult to host dinner parties at home, so restaurants became the salon. The NYTimes must help tremendously in pushing the brain/food conspiracy, together with other local papers/writers I don't know of....does the radio there do this as well? (and no, we don't have any obsession-worthy sports teams to speak of....sigh. my local liquor store guy just told me that he didn't carry any tobacco advertising because he played soccer and thought it was just wrong--and hadn't I seen him on television?) edited b/c I scanned the oldest egulleters thread: Maybe the longetivity of new york restaurants also spill into this mix. In the midwest (my original home), many of us grew up on a looonnnnggg frugal history of eating out only on special occasions, when you ordered the cheapest prixe fix and got one glass of wine for the entire meal. dessert was once in a blue moon--maybe you'd split something and have cookies at home. not sure what you all did during the Depression, but I don't think it scarred your culinary development in quite the same way.

To take two current examples--the JG thread makes several leaps from the basic 'facts' of the restaurants to their broader context through a discussion of the role of innovation and of stasis in cooking. The Oceana thread jumps off the food to a discussion of fine dining definitions, expectations, and measurements. maybe that's what's so striking--you frequently start with the facts on plates, and then you use those facts as a springboard for the broader dynamics of food and chefs and all things good and gustatory. And while that _is_ much of egullet's mission? goal? purpose? the New York threaders appear better at it than the rest of us regionalites, and I've frequently heard New Yorkers do the same in person, at length, and wondered at it. That might stem from self-selection of the hard core new york crowd--but I wonder how the city plays back into nurturing that crowd, with its myriad of print, online, and personal mirrors to the food world there intensifying examination and discussion.... does that make any sense?