Where Not To Go In DC

According to the Tea Party of Maine, you should not ride the Yellow or Green lines of the DC Metro.

If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.

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Places I have been to recently which are on those lines include Dukem Ethiopian Food on U Street and Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, home of the cricket taco. On the other hand perhaps Tea Partiers are better off not stretching their culinary palate in that way.

From the Official Maine Tea Party DC Tourist Guide, they offer this helpful piece of xenophobia on why DC is so unsafe:

DC's population includes refugees from every country, as the families of embassy staffs of third world countries tend to stay in DC whenever a revolution in their homeland means that anyone in their family would be in danger if they went back.

For those teabaggers who are tempted to try some ethnic food, they do offer this suggestion:

Libertarianish Virginia economics professor Tyler Cowen extensively explores and reviews restaurants, especially Northern Virginia Asian fare, at http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/

I like the idea that a professor has to be identified as 'libertarianish' so as to remove the taint of taking ethnic food suggestions from an actual member of the educated elite.

So, teabaggers, please by all means avoid anything in DC interesting or tasty. All the more for me.

Restaurant Week Wars

For you non-DCers mid-January is a time of great rejoicing and feasting. No, it's not King Day, it's Restaurant Week. Restaurants of all cusines and price levels offer 3-course dinners for the price of $35.10 (the cents go up a penny each year insuring that inflation erodes any profitability) excluding drinks, tax, tips, parking and coat check. So while the prices sound cheap, it's real easy to be north of Benjamin in a hurry.

The trick then is to pick a restaurant that offers the best value and that is harder than it looks. The dirty secret is that the more high end places create special low-end dishes that are cut-rate versions of their signature meals. And at the budget ended participants, thirty-five bucks goes pretty far and you might as well just order ala carte because there just isn't any bargain to the meal.

This year we tried an experiment and went to two different steak places and compared the selections.

Restaurant	The Caucus Room	Finn and Porter
Ambiance	In the basement of an office building on 9th and D with a view of the brutalist FBI building across the street, this tries for a clubby simulation of a place politicians would hang out and smoke cigars in. A series of small dining rooms lets them cater to groups very easily. It is going for refined high class and missing the mark by just a smidgen.	The 'hotel restaurant' of the Embassy Suites on 10th and New York, the place is large and airy and open. Just last week on a business trip I ate at a Finn and Porter in a Hilton, so I suspect the chain is a Hilton knock-off of the Ruth's Chris/Mortons mold.
Parking	Five dollar self-park in the office building garage with validation.	Five dollar valet at the hotel with validation.
Crowd	Not too busy. Plenty of empty tables between 7:30 and nine.	Average. The place filled up and there were several large tables full of business travelers.
Menu choices Each restaurant had a beef, poultry of seafood dish available. We had the beef and poultry and passed on the seafood.	Doing an end run around the value menu concept, in addition to the $35 price point, they also had $42 and $55 menus each with more choices and more elaborate dishes.	Finn and Porter stayed to the concept, but still had very limited choices.
Drinks	As part or RW, they offered either a house white or a house red for nine bucks. I had the chardonnay and it was very good. My wife sprang an extra buck for a pinot grigot off the regular menu and it was even better.	The RW menu included a special wine menu with over a half dozen bottles price between 25 and 40 bucks each. And while they were tempting, we instead went for the $14 specialty cocktails off the regular menu. My wife had a lemoncello vodka drink that took her cares away. She followed up with a glass of white wine that was not up to the quality of the Caucus Room. My pomo cosmo was okay but not up to my girlie drink standards.
First Course	At $35, you only get a salad. When I asked my waiter why mine was missing the cheese, he pointed out on the menu that mozzarella only comes on the higher priced lists.	A choice of a salad or a soup. The soup was a clam chowder and quite flavorful. The salad hit all my hot buttons: mixed greens, nuts, dried cranberries, and gorgonzola. A bigger portion would have been a meal.
Beef dish	Steak with pomme frites came in a generous 8 ounce size but just a little tough and overcooked. The fries were perhaps a little too delicate and tough to eat gracefully.	A really nice sized sirloin just a shade under medium rare and still very juicy. Delicious taste. A really good steak. The side was an indistinguishable mess of grilled potatoes and vegetables.
Poultry	A roasted half chicken with a delicious crispy skin. The dark meat was just a little bloody and the white meat was tough to pick off the bones. The wild rice was drier than I liked, but the cranberry sauce made the dish. Very tart and sweet, I want this on table next Thanksgiving.	A plump chicken breast that was very juicy and meaty.
Dessert Both places offered only a single dessert.	A delicious mango sorbet that served as a small but tasty	Red velvet cake with a decent cream cheese frosting.
Service Here is where all RW places fail.	Lackluster. Just a little too droopy and slow.	Harried. Friendly but divided between too many tables.
Overall Value	Poor. You were clearly shown that you were getting the budget food and should have sprung for a pricier menu.	Good. Decent portions with presentation and quality level not much different from the regular menu

Saturday we go the opposite direction and try a casual trendy food place in Montgomery County.

A Tale Of Two Turkey Dinners

For reasons I'm still trying to sort out, we found ourselves on a thousand mile road trip to Savannah for Thanksgiving to eat the fried goodness of Paula Deen. Along the way we picked up our son in Atlanta who has learned were all the good food is made. So before we hit the road again, we stopped at a trendy burger place in Atlanta. Here is how the two stack up against each other.

Restaurant	The Lady And Sons	Flip Burger
The Sign
Location	Savannah In the historic district near the waterfront.	Atlanta In the industrial Howell Mill area.
Cooking Show Connection	Paula Deen is a Southern style fixture on the Food Network with a bevy of shows. Her two sons also have their own travel style show.	Top Chef Season Three runner-up Richard Blais is a 'consultant' to the restaurant.
Decor	Southern antebellum as designed by DisneyWorld. You enter through the gift shop and are assaulted by about everything Paula Deen related. I bought a kitchen towel with her macaroni and cheese recipe on it. The restaurant is three floors tall with the main dining room on the top floor.	A hip trendy night club with lots of neon and dim track lighting. In keeping with the 'flip' theme, all the tables and booths are mirrored on the ceiling.
Reservations	Only taken for holidays, which is part of why we went. Normally only same-day times are available starting at 9:30 am, so getting good time is hit or miss.	None. First come, first serve. There is usually a line and they do a lot of take-out business.
The Food	For Thanksgiving dinner they had a buffet with the requisite turkey and ham, but there was also plenty of fried chicken. All the southern style sides were there as well, including mac and cheese, green beans, creamed corn, succotash and the like.	The special Thanksgiving burger was a turkey patty topped with cranberry sauce, green beans, and fried onions. For dessert I got a pumpkin pie milkshake.
Verdict	Paula Deen is force of nature and her high volume tourist trap moves the people through. Still, the comfort food is well cooked and free of the extremes found in kitschy	The burgers are all cleverly designed with unique ingredients. The side dishes are varied and tend towards the trendy
Will I Return?	Probably. I would like to eat off the regular menu. What is the point of going to Savannah if you can't put some South in your Mouth.	Most definitely. The burgers are great, reasonably priced, and very convenient to the Georgia Tech campus.

Deconstructing Guy Fieri

There are two types of hosts on cooking shows, chefs and personalities. Anthony Bourdain is a chef. He went to the Culinary Institute of America. He rose through the ranks of the sweaty kitchens, wrote a bestseller and now makes most of him money doing personal appearances. Rachel Ray is a personality. She's cute and perky and has introduced more than one annoying catch phrase into the vernacular. But she has never run a restaurant.

Guy Fieri has some cooking chops but he definitely falls on the personality side of the scale. At the Anthony Bourdain and David Chang "I Call Bullshit" show I saw recently, Chang, who runs the hottest restaurant in New York was quoted in Grub Street as saying cooking is not about “fuckin’ sunglasses and that stupid fuckin’ armband.” He then made Bourdain swear to push him down the stairs if he started dressing that way.

Bourdain as a TV chef himself had some more sympathy. He said that the price of being Guy Fieri is that every day you have to wake up and be Guy Fieri. As fate would have it, as I was returning to my hotel Sunday morning, Guy and his entourage stepped out of the elevator. I followed them out to the front of the hotel and took some pictures. Guy saw my workout clothes and asked me if I had been running. I said I had jogged up from the World Trade Center site and he seemed politely impressed (I later checked, it was two miles away). So if Guy is a jerk, he wasn't one to me.

Still, Fieri was in his full Poochie-becomes-a-Juggalo costume. So like a master chef does to a fine meal, lets deconstruct what it takes to be Guy Fieri.

Frosted tips. It takes more product to keep that bleached Sonic the Hedgehog look going that most guys ever own. The spiked hair must take an hour every day all by itself.

Sunglasses. It's not enough to be wearing wrap-around sunglasses at nine in the morning, they have to be logo-ed in silver.

Earring. Like a goatee (which Guy also sports), I thought the guy-lobe had gone by the wayside, but they live on. I just hope he has the correct ear in case he goes cruising in Chelsea.



Necklace. Only Mr. T wears more metal around his neck than this silver monstrosity that screams Intercontinental Belt Champion. Somewhere a Navajo jeweler is counting his coins.

Embroidered Bowling Shirt. Just how much needlepoint does it take before a Tony Soprano shirt qualifies for its own Pride Day Parade? I'm not sure Dolly Parton owns that many rhinestones.




Armband. The most perplexing signature piece of the ensemble is the wrist band pushed up onto the forearm. While Wikipedia has an explanation, it still seems just a mite ridiculous.

Bracelet. And since the wristband is not in the traditional spot on the wrist, that frees up some space for some more bling.



Watch. Guy has a busy schedule. He's about to go on a 22 city tour so he needs to know what time it is.

Thumb Ring. Just so that the left hand doesn't feel jealous, the sinister digits get some bling as well.



Cargo Shorts. The only celebrity that can carry off the halfway between the knee and the ankle hem line is Kevin Smith and that is because he is going for Cinematic Slob rather than Redneck Restaurateur.

Logo Patch. When it comes to branding, Guy has his logo on him more places than Tiger Woods has swooshes on the 18th hole of Augusta. You're Guy Fieri. We get it. Just how many subliminal Knuckle Sandwich shots do we need?

Black Socks. (not pictured) The bad boy image just doesn't work if you are wearing white anklets. The black crew socks go with the sneakers like mustard on a hot dog.


It IS a full time job being Guy Fieri. Elton John doesn't get this dolled up to make a public appearance. As Anthony Bourdain sighs with resignation, "It's a Food Network world." We just live in it. And Guy Fieri plays the part of the court jester, costume and all.

Food Festival Fanaticism

We went up to New York for the second time this October. This time, rather than stalk hunks in Broadway shows, we went to stalk celebrity chefs. The 2nd Annual New York Food and Wine was taking place in and around the Meatpacking District. The events themselves were kinda pricey, particularly if they involved actual food or wine. Instead we just signed up for talks and demos by our favorite TV chefs.

We like Anthony Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations so much we saw him twice. The first talk was with David Chang, the hyper-popular and rather profane chef of the suspiciously named Momofuku restaurants. The talk was called "I Call Bullshit" and that was probably the most family friendly sentence in the entire hour. Among the things they called bullshit on were cupcakes, pork bellies with foam, Krispy Kreme cheeseburgers, and Guy Fieri.

The next night on the other end of town Bourdain was interviewed by Frank Bruni, former restaurant critic of the New York Times, where he laid into some of the same topics. In particular he singled out Alice Waters as an overly militant food zealot. He made a particular point that he didn't disagree with her, he just hated her tone and patronizing manner, calling her Pol Pot in a muumuu. He accused her of burning six cords of wood to cook Leslie Stahl one egg. He was pretty close, as this video proves:


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Less potty-mouthed but just as entertaining was Alton Brown the food scientist. Rather than give a demonstration, he presented the ten things he was pretty certain he knew about food. Item 2 was that chicken do NOT have fingers.

He gave a lot of practical reasoned advice. For example he said that 'organic' is a meaningless marketing term that has been sapped of any meaning it might have ever had. However, 'local' was a word he could understand. Get a map and draw a circle and you can understand what qualifies as locally grown. He said that if you wanted strawberries out of season, buy a bunch in season and freeze them. That advice gave me bad high school flashbacks of being pressed into the you-pick strawberry fields every March to fill the freezer with the tail end of the Florida strawberry crop.

There were a lot of other chefs and food personalities and the easiest way to catch them was at their book signings. For example, the Giada De Laurentiis signing was entirely full, so we snagged Tyler Florence's book since he was signing right next to her and had a much shorter line. Twofer.



Ironically, we were so busy running around to events that we had a hard time slicing out time to actually eat. We just happened to stumble on some great places in the Meatpacking District including Asian seafood place cum nightclub Sea, replica French brasserie Pastis, and BLT Burger, master chef Laurent Tourondel's foray into cheap eats.



And speaking of meatpacking (and I would make some sort of Chelsea joke here but I'm bigger than that), right next to our hotel was one of the last remaining real meatpacking plants left in the increasingly inaccurately named neighborhood. But this was a rather upscale butcher. They receive already slaughter meat and then dry age and trim it for the high end New York steak places like craftsteak up the street. I was tempted to smuggle one out in the butcher coat they made us wear.



All-in-all we had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat. You can check out more pictures in the Flickr set which includes the model shoot we stumbled on in the middle of Ninth Avenue.

Top Chef Brunch-Off

Indulging my new-found celebrity chef stalking obsession, we found ourselves the past couple of weekends near restaurants run by current Top Chef contestants. While brunch is not the ideal meal to judge a restaurant by, these were perhaps our only chances to eat at these places to see how the actual eatery compared to the personality of the contestant.

Restaurant	10 Arts Philadelphia	Trestle On Tenth New York
Chef	Jennifer Carroll	Ash Fulk
Cuisine	Modern American	Swiss Bistro
Top Chef Reputation	She garnered a reputation in the first episode for mispronouncing ceviche. Intense and focused, she is considered one of the front runners.	Skating on the bubble, Ash has a propensity for not quite being able to finish a dish in time.
Atmosphere	The restaurant is one side of the lobby of the Ritz Carlton in downtown Philadelphia. The hotel is a repurposed bank with a monstrous lobby full of marble and grandeur. Neon lights have been spread around the lobby to give the place a glowing hipster vibe.	Located on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 24th Street in Chelsea, the brick walls and dark wood gives trestle a warm comfortable feel. A small bar at the entrance gives it neigborhood sense. Doubling the seating area is a garden area out back enclosed by a small fence.
Food	For the novelty of it, I ordered an egg-white spinach omelette with goat cheese. The goat cheese was a perfect match for the lighter taste of the egg-white. The other dish we got was buttermilk pancakes which were amazingly fluffy and absolutely perfect. For sides we got both bacon and sausage but either one would have been enough for two people. Of the two, the sausage was much better with a rich maple taste.	The gratinéed pizokel were little schnitzel-like dumplings and the open face pork sandwich had tangy sauerkraut with a thick topping of fontina cheese. The omelette was billed as goat cheese and herbs. Rather than being in the omelette, the goat cheese was just a light topping on the top. And the definition of herbs included spinach, zucchini, and green beans. The vegetables overpowered the egg. For dessert, a delicious walnut torte had a thick butter crust was topped with rich ice cream and whipped cream.
Chef Sighting	On a Saturday morning we had no expectations of the chief chef being around. However, there were several signs in the lobby touting Jennifer as a Top Chef 'cheftestant' and promoting their Wednesday viewing parties.	Ash is listed on the show as the restaurants sous chef but none of the owners or chefs are touted anywhere on the menu or the restaurant website.
Verdict	One of the best breakfasts I have ever had. Everything was cooked to perfection and then some. However, the dining room was nearly empty on a Saturday morning and seemed to be catering to the captive hotel crowd. Unless you are in Philly on business you are unlikely to stumble upon this downtown gem because parking is difficult and expensive. I imagine the evening scene is much wilder when all the glowing neon plays up the decor.	This neighborhood place has both good food and is located in a great funky New York neigborhood. The people next to us were a professional photographer and his aging hipster friends. By noon the place was full of regulars. If I were a local, I could see myself paying a few bucks more compared to some other brunch places in New York to come back again and again.

Top Chef Masters Face Off

When planning our trip to Chicago we knew we wanted to eat at some places frequented by President Obama. One of the tough tables is Table 52 run by Art Smith. Soon thereafter we started watching the end of the Masters edition of Top Chef. Art Smith made it to fourth place, being done in by not being able to make a vegan desert. The eventual winner was an affable mustachioed chef who was dedicated to preserving and spreading authentic Mexican cuisine.

So here is a side by side comparison of two top chefs in the Windy City.

Restaurant	Table 52	Frontera Grille
Chef	Art Smith	Rick Bayless
Cuisine	Southern	Mexican
Claim To Fame	A favorite of Oprah Winfrey, this is where Barack Obama took Michelle for Valentines Day.	Widely considered the best Mexican restaurant in the country, Bayless won the Top Chef Masters.
Atmosphere	The décor is made to resemble a genteel Southern home. With tables pressed close together, groups end up talking to each other. The service is very high end with all the waiters, servers and bussers working together seamlessly.	Typically Mexican with lots of bright colors and adobe textures. Seating is first come first serve, so the line starts forming about 45 minutes before opening. By the time the restaurant is open, the line is literally down the block.
Food	For entrees we had blackened sockeye salmon which came served with a great zucchini ‘peperdelle’ and some sea scallops. But the star of the meal was the three-cheese mac and cheese. I’m a serious macaroni and cheese fan and have eaten a lot of high end flavors but this was one of the best ones I have ever had. We pried out of the wait staff that it was a sharp white cheddar, a yellow cheddar and parmesan cheeses. For dessert we split the hummingbird cake and still couldn’t finish it.	Since it was brunch, most of the dishes had an egg component. The best choice we made was to get the appetizer sampler which included these tasty little Mexico City style quesadillas and Bayless’s signature guacamole. For entrees we had Cazuela de Borrego, a lamb dish, and steak and cheese enchiladas. Several of the deluxe margaritas are shaken at the table with a lime as the shaker top. Two of those will make any brunch go better.
Chef Sighting	Art Smith tours the dining room about once an hour chatting with guests, posing for pictures, and autographing cookbooks. He is friendly and gregarious.	We had seen Bayless at his quick service restaurant Xoco where he politely posed for a picture but quickly went back to managing the open kitchen. As we were seated right at the opening of Fontera Grille, we saw him in the back surveying the crowd being seated. He quietly went to the back, not to be seen again.
Verdict	Table 52 is a fine high end restaurant with good food but it just feels a little forced. It’s too busy to be intimate and too fancy to be casual.	The Bayless empire also includes the aforementioned Xoco and the higher end Topolobampo, but the flagship Frontera Grille lives up to its reputation as perhaps the best Mexican food to be found north of the Rio Grande.

Fries Are NOT A Condiment

What I originally planned as a daytrip turned into a weekend getaway. Having exhausted most tourist destinations (particularly the ones with air conditioning) within a two-hour radius, we headed west for Three Rivers City. Our first stop in Pittsburgh was the famous Primanti Brothers where the sandwiches are famous for coming with the sides between the slices of bread instead of on the plate.

Each sandwich comes with French fries and coleslaw as condiments. The fries are thick cut and hot. The coleslaw is crisp and tangy. The overall effect is delicious if a little odd-looking. This approach to all-in-one eating does make for a rather un-photogenic meal.

Rather than getting the Pitts-burgher which is labeled as their “second biggest seller”, I went with a roast beef sandwich which was quite tasty in its own right. When I asked the waiter what the top seller was, he pointed to my pint glass of Yuengling and said “You’ll be drinking it in about five seconds.”

As we ate our way across the city, I could fill my arteries hardening and my waistline expanding. Sure enough, when I got home I had put on two pounds from just a weekend trip. I can’t imagine what would happen to me if I lived there.

Hella Father's Day

We have two Father's Day traditions. I pick some place to go out to eat and my son and I go on a father-son bike ride. Usually the dinner place is a burger joint or barbecue. Definitely not anything upscale or fancy. This started several years ago when I wanted to do some biking on the Mount Vernon Trail and had heard of some obscure burger place in Alexandria called Five Guys. They only served burgers and hot dogs and fries. Now Five Guys are everywhere. The other day Barack Obama went to the Five Guys in south DC and made the news.

But a few weeks before that he went to another burger joint called Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington. He caused quite a kerfuffle among those willing to hate him for any reason whatsoever by asking for 'spicy mustard' aka Dijon. Right wingers took this as further evidence of Obama's inherent foreign-ness.

Hell Burger is not owned by Ray. There is no Ray. It is owned by Michael Landrum, a DC restaurateur known for his persnickity rules. His original steak place is called Ray's The Steaks, a bad pun it took even me a while to figure out (make better steaks, raise the stakes, get it?). Then he opened Ray's The Classics in Silver Springs which is about the best steaks in all of DC.

So when Obama went to Hell Burger, I knew I had no other choice since it intersected my two food eating obsessions, good burgers and eating where Obama eats (those places are for another day). The lines at Ray's restaurants are legendary and I knew it would take some planning to go there. I called the restaurant and got the voicemail machine which said they opened at noon Tuesday thru Sunday. We got there at 12:03 and we glided right into the small strip mall parking lot and miraculously found a space right out front but found the placed packed. It seems that according to the sign out front he really opens at 11:30.

There are actually two Hell Burgers. The one Obama went to is at 1713 Wilson Blvd and is a take-out line. The other is four doors down at 1725 where you can get a table and have your burger brought to you. This one seems to be the original Rays The Steaks and looks way too small to have ever been the toughest seat in DC.

I mentioned persnickity rules. The big one at Hell Burger is no claiming a table until you have placed your order. We saw this honored more in the breach as vultures stalked people leaving. It's one thing to have rules, it's another to enforce them. We placed our order and still got a great table out front.

And the burgers. Truly one of the greatest burgers ever. Ten ounces of prime beef cooked to order with dozens of toppings. Yeah, you can go crazy and get the $17.50 one with bone marrow and truffle oil, but you don't need to. Burgers start at $6.95 and most toppings are free. Fancier items like cheese range from a buck to four dollars for the Amish cave-aged cheddar. I went with the Vermont white cheddar it was the best cheese I have ever had on a burger. My wife had applewood bacon and it was what bacon was meant to be. And right on the table was ketchup, yellow mustard, and brown spicy mustard. This is America, you top your burger with what you want.

And these burgers were big. Two hands to hold and don't drip all over your ten dollar Chinese counterfeit Tommy Bahama shirt like I did. Good food is worth hunting down. And Hell Burger lives up to its name. It's one helluva burger.

Comfort Food In New York

For Boxing Day yesterday we took a family day trip to New York City. In the Big Apple there are all sorts of dining choices including the finest restaurants in the country. But you don’t need to spend a lot of money to get good food. We went up knowing of one place we wanted to go to, but all the others we ate at were sheer happenstance. You can get a wide variety of comfort foods no matter what your heritage or taste.

Macaroni and Cheese

We’ve been on gourmet mac and cheese hunts in New York before, but Manhattan has, not one, but two restaurants that serve macaroni and cheese exclusively. The Megabus that we took up dropped us off at Penn Station. Just a few blocks south on Broadway is Supermac, a very narrow storefront tucked next to a much fancier restaurant. It offers over a dozen different flavors in two different sizes. The large, which my son and I ordered, proved we both had eyes bigger than our stomachs. I had the buffalo chicken, my wife had hamburger, and my son went for the applewood bacon. We found it interesting that we each had picked a different barnyard animal to accompany our noodles and cheese. Each variety also uses a different base cheese. The applewood for example was rich with gorgonzola. The owner was chatting with some customers about possible franchising strategies. We concurred amongst ourselves that this concept would go over great in food courts or near college campuses.

Banh Mi Sandwiches

Chinatown is a very popular New York destination for cheap jewelry, knock-off purses and watches of suspicious origin. But it also has a great selection of dining places. To avoid the crowds on Canal Street, we had cut down to Walker Street. We were admiring the window display of XO, a good Chinese restaurant we had eaten at years ago, when I noticed the awning a store called Sau Voi Corp with some of the few words in Vietnamese I recognize, Bánh Mì. These little sandwiches have a choice of meats and are garnished with pickled carrots, cilantro and jalapenos. The store itself is dusty affair crammed with Chinese and Vietnamese DVDs, CDs, and cassettes. In one small corner is a sandwich shop making said delights. My wife got one fresh and hot and it delighted her. The smallest places are sometimes the best discoveries.

Cream Puffs

Heading up Broadway we passed a brightly lit pastry place called Beard Papa which I recognized from some food show or another. They specialize in cream puffs. The flavor of the day was green tea, but I went with the regular. The gooey oozing cream filling was delightfully tasy but not overly sweet. The same went for the mocha frozen drink which was so much better than the overpriced highly caffeinated milkshakes at some ubiquitous coffee shop chains I could name. My son went for a fruit crepe. The crepe is hand cooked in front of you (and it took the shy giggly worker two tries to get it right) and filled with fruit and cream filling rolled up like a dessert burrito. This chain seems to have been started in Japan and the decor and lightness of the flavors carries on that particular sensibility.

Hamburgers

Passing under the awning of this restaurant elicited unbidden from my son the catch phrase “Welcome to Goodburger, home of the good burger, how may I help you?” from the All That running sketch and the astoundingly dreadful Kel and Kenan movie based on them. Other than the name, the restaurant seems to have no affiliation with the Nickelodeon show, although they do suspiciously offer a crabby patty. The burgers clearly lived up to their name. Fat and tall, they are cooked to order with the choice of all the usual condiments. The prices straddle the line between a fast food joint and a sit-down restaurant. A burger, fries, and drink combo runs just north of ten bucks. You can get milkshakes or beer as well. According to my wife, the fries compare favorably with McDonalds which is high praise from her.

The entire day of eating cost less than one person’s bill at Frankie and Johnnie’s and we all rode home on the bus well into the night fully satiated on the comfort foods that just hit our respective spots.

Rachel Ray and Rubber Bands

This is the filthiest video I have ever seen on YouTube. It goes to show you that Rachel Ray can make anything look exciting.



Yummo.

Have A Coke And A Smile

Over at View From The Cloud, Jeff opened a firestorm by delving into the pop versus soda controversy. He also took time to ridicule those that called any soft drink a coke, whether is was bottled but the Coca-Cola corporation or not. This is a controversy of deep regional division as the following map (which I've used before) shows:

(click for a big version)

"Soda" is most common in the Northeast and California. "Pop" holds sway in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. "Coke" rules in the Deep South. I live in Maryland which seems totally befuddled. The most puzzling part of this whole kerfuffle is that few places call it "cola" which sure seems like it would be the most logical generic name for a carbonated cola-flavored beverage.

Most people when they see this map begin chuckling at southerners for not knowing that Coke is a brand, not a description. Jeff Foxworthy, in addition to his many fine redneck identification tips, once said that when people hear a southern drawl, they spot you ten IQ points right off the bat. He would know. That Foxworthy has a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech seems to have slipped off his resume somewhere along the line.

I don't see the problem with calling soft drinks "coke". People blow their nose with Kleenex and take Tylenol for headaches after drinking too much Lite beer and Xeroxing their butts on the office copier. Lots of brand names become generic terms, often against the wishes of the manufacturers. Just ask Bayer.

Most of the time, if you are below what I call the Sweet Tea Line and you order a coke, you'll get Coke®, so their is a certain economy in ordering it that way. I once worked with a lady whose husband was the head of distribution for Pepsi-Cola in the state of Georgia. We used to tease her about what a hopeless cause that was. Besides, since most places let you fill your own know, so what difference does it make what you call it.

The last time we were in Georgia, we made point to visit the new Coke Museum which is full of great memorabilia and history. But best of all, they have sampling dispensers where you can taste all the flavors bottled one every continent. The Japanese apple flavor was the best and some Italian style that tasted like quinine was universally despised by visitors.

Going over my old blog posts, I realize that I fall in the "soda" camp. For this (as with most things) I blame my New England bred mother. She used to go on and on about all the great flavors of Nehi (which morphed into Royal Crown) like Radar O'Reilly. She also used to insist that subs sandwiches were grinders and that aunt was pronounced "awwwnt".

Cold cut sandwiches are another source of regional name differences. In addition to grinders, there are subs and hoagies and heroes. I have an unproven theory that the hero sandwich is an Americanization of gyro.

But you can call food and drinks whatever you want, but as long as it tastes good, I'll be there.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: What regional name for a food or drink do you use?

Streets of Soho

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
walkin through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was lookin for the place called Lee Ho Fooks,
gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein.

On Thursday I posted a picture of me in front of Lee Ho Fooks, the Soho Chinese restaurant made famous by Warren Zevon. The slip of paper in my hand was not a menu, but a coupon that a street barker was handing out. In our group that was touring together, there was an age divide right around 35 that recognized the cultural significance of the place while the younger generation was perplexed with our fascination.

Since we were with a group tour, we had most of our meals covered which meant eating a lot of mediocre food in places that cater to tourists. We had fish and chips one night and curry another. We did have Chinese one day at a different Chinatown place, but no beef chow mein.


On our free night, we found ourselves back in the Soho/Charing Cross area looking for a place and stumbled onto Norman’s Coach and Horses that was a traditional British pub catering to the locals rather than the tourists. And even though we picked it at random out of severe hunger, it seems that the place has a colorful history. The upstairs dining room was closed for a private party but they let us eat down in the pub portion. I had a bangers sandwich that had a cutesy name and my wife had the meat pie. Both were delicious.


We kept getting jostled by the drinking patrons who were very wrapped up in watching some international rugby tournament. For dessert, two doors down was an authentic French pastry shop with outdoor dining. That was a great way to satisfy our sweet tooths in Soho. So we had lots of great dining in London, but never did run into any werewolves with perfect hair walking with the queen.