Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

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Leadership secrets of Non-Fictional characters (Part 3 of a series.)

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

One piece of writing that changed the way I thought is Seth Godin’s “Why Are We Willing To Tolerate Bullies?” essay in Fast Company issue number 41. If you have not read that essay, I commend it to your attention.

That essay is the first thing I thought of when I read this entry in the “Diner’s Journal” blog at the NYT: “Why I Got Kicked Out of a Restaurant on Saturday Night” by Ron Lieber. The short version: Mr. Lieber and his party sat down to dine, and were treated to the chef loudly berating one of his staff members. After this went on for a while, Mr. Lieber went into the kitchen and informed the chef that he was disrupting the dining experience, as well as being a bully, and asked the chef to stop. The chef responded by asking Mr. Lieber and his party to leave.

My reaction is that Mr. Lieber did the right and noble thing; he stood up to a bully. I would expect people to be backing him up. Instead, many of the comments at the NYT site seem to take the chef’s side, talking about the kitchen being “sacred” space, or making Gordon Ramsey comparisons.

The kitchen is sacred space, and Mr. Lieber shouldn’t have entered? No, not when I’m paying for the dining experience, and you’re disrupting it. Once what goes on in your “sacred space” overlaps into my space, you’ve lost any right you have to privacy.

Yes, kitchens are rough places to work, as Anthony Bourdain will tell you. But he’s also made it clear that there’s a difference between normal kitchen behavior, where people blow up at each other and get over it in a few minutes, and this kind of pathological yelling at staff.

Gordon Ramsey does it? Maybe he does; all most of us have seen is his TV persona, and I’ve seen damn little of that. I’ll tell you something else about Gordon Ramsey, though. Bourdain tells a story about what happened when Ramsey quit one of the restaurants he was working in; the entire staff quit. Not just the back-of-the-house kitchen staff who were closest to Ramsey, but the entire front of the house staff as well. Can you inspire that kind of loyalty in your staff? Then maybe you can get away with yelling at them like Ramsey.

When we tolerate bullying behavior, even if it’s just putting up with a chef yelling in a restaurant, we’re moving down a slippery slope. One day, it’s just someone yelling at his staff. But tolerate that long enough, and eventually you’re tolerating prosecutors and judges trying to railroad innocent defendants. At some point, we need to draw a line and stand up to the bullies. And we need to backstop each other when we do.

Well done, Mr. Lieber. Shame on you, Marc Forgione.

(Hattip: Mom for the NYT article. Popehat has the best short summary I’ve found of the Tonya Craft trial, with plenty of links to other coverage. Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog has been on the case as well.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law, Leadership | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

“It is actually very difficult to overdose on Vitamin D, but two million IU a day is a good start.”

By way of Lowering the Bar.

Edited to add: Quote of the day #2.

“Right off the bat you know this is not your usual capital case in that the defendant’s middle name is neither ‘Wayne’ nor ‘Dale,’ which standing alone is probably enough to support a claim of actual innocence.”

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Posted in Food, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 4, 2010.

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

The Statesman has the first article I’ve seen touching on ridership for the Capital Metro trains. While this article mostly discusses the experimental Saturday train, this paragraph is significant:

Capital Metro has had much lighter ridership for its Monday-to-Friday rush hour service during the line’s six weeks of existence — about 1,000 a day since fares began, officials said.

The LAT profiles the Pho Binh noodle shop in Saigon. They serve “peace noodles” soup; and the Tet Offensive was plotted upstairs.

Today is the 40th anniversary of Kent State.

Obit watch: Lynn Redgrave.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Obits, Trains | Comments Closed

I heartily endorse this event or product. (#5 in a series).

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Taste of Ethiopia Restaurant and Cafe in Pflugerville.

I usually reserve the food plugs for the SDC pages (and a full review will be coming on the SDC site), but I have specific reasons for putting an endorsement here as well.

In short, this is the kind of place I live to find when we do the SDC; a small, family run place with excellent food and great service. The owners even brought out some extra food (at no charge) for our party. (I should add that the portions are big enough that we had trouble finishing what we already had.)

In addition, the owner apparently overheard Lawrence giving me my birthday present (He had some trouble finding it here in town, which is why it was a bit late.) and brought out…yes, a slice of birthday cake. I know Lawrence tried to take a photo of me in full “Please, just let me crawl under the table and hide” mode while they were singing “Happy Birthday”, and I’ll put that up here if he sends it to me.

I’m worried about these folks; they’re hard working, but Taste of Ethiopia isn’t in a high traffic part of the Austin metro area. It is, however, the best Ethiopian food I’ve had to date in Austin. I strongly encourage folks to pay them a visit.

Posted in Endorsements, Food | Comments Closed

Austin food watch: May 3, 2010.

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

There will be blood.

Cissi’s Market on South Congress (right in the middle of the hipster district) shut down Friday. SoCo is kind of off the beaten path for me these days, so I never ate there, and really don’t have much to say.

More interesting to me is the closure of Primizie Osteria. (Hattip: Lawrence, who alerted me to this. I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else.) We had an SDC there, and were generally unimpressed (it struck us as very expensive and not worth it). Edited to add: Lawrence has corrected me: I was actually thinking of Sagra Enoteca Trattoria, not Primizie Osteria. Primizie did come up a few times, but we never actually ate there. My apologies to the Primizie management. However, what makes this interesting to me is the note on their website about the reasons they closed:

Although the down economy has not done us any favors, the main reason for our decision is that our landlord, Austin Revitalization Authority, refused to renegotiate the terms of our lease to make them more aligned with industry averages, the location and the density of the area. All of our decisions and projections for the restaurant were based on four multi-use developments which were to have been completed on the 11th/12thstreet corridors. As you probably know from the countless articles on the development of this area, the City of Austin and the Austin Revitalization Authority have failed to deliver on all accounts.

This isn’t the first restaurant closing I’ve seen that’s been blamed on the ARA. As I recall, Ms. B’s closed both of their locations after running into problems with the ARA while trying to open the 11st Street location.

Something like this is perhaps the kind of thing a real newspaper could look into; what other restaurants have gotten involved with the ARA? How many of them have had satisfactory experiences with the ARA? How many have closed, and how much money is the city out from those closures?

Posted in Food, Media | Comments Closed

Random notes: April 30, 2010.

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Headline in the NYT: “On This Oregon Trail, Pioneers Embrace Organic Wine“.

Oh, sure, organic wine is all fun and games, until you die of dysentery.

In other news, “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick” is coming in two volumes. Also, Valdez is coming, but that’s another story.

Adding to the “Blood in the Streets” watch, two out of three of our local Fuddrucker’s have closed (Anderson Lane, and I-35 North, between 290 and 183 along the access road). I’m curious; if any of my readers live in cities with Fuddrucker’s (I believe the chain is primarily Southern), have any of your locations closed recently?

Edited to add: Brian Dunbar‘s comment prompted me to do what I should have done earlier. According to the Fuddrucker’s website (Warning! Audio!), they’re more spread out than I thought. And I’d never heard of the Koo Koo Roo chain. Additionally, it appears that Magic Brands LLC, who owned both chains, sold “substantially all of its assets” to Tavistock Group on April 21st (for $40 million), and, at the same time, filed Chapter 11.

As part of Fuddruckers plan to concentrate resources in operations with the strongest potential for growth, the company will use the Chapter 11 process to terminate certain leases and will close 24 corporate-owned Fuddruckers restaurants by April 30, 2010.

Here’s a link to Fuddrucker’s announcement of the sale and Chapter 11 restructuring.

Lawrence predicted a while back that someday, people would pay real money for non-existent (i.e. “virtual”) stuff. I don’t remember if he predicted phase 2 of that: real world lawsuits over rights to non-existent property.

What China needs: strict hammer control laws.

Friday Astros update: 8-13, .381 winning percentage, projected 61.722 wins.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law, Loser, Mixology | 1 Comment »

Austin food notes: April 21, 2010.

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Blood is running in the streets.

I sent around an email about this yesterday, but Lawrence suggested I might want to note that The Veranda has closed.

Rob Balon has some comments here. He’s a lot more sympathetic to the place than we are. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy ate there once; it wasn’t the worst SDC ever, but it was in the bottom 10. (Not mentioned in that review, because I didn’t find out until later; at least two of the people in our party actually got sick after eating there.)

On the other hand, Louie’s 106 has also closed. This was a place I liked, though it was a bit outside my price range for normal dining. The reasons for closing are unclear: the Statesman says they haven’t been able to contact the owner, but Rob Balon suggests that it might have had something to do with mechanical and structural problems in the building.

And the capper: Joe DiMaggio’s in the Domain is closed. We didn’t get a chance to try it, though we were trying to make arrangements. The problem we had was that we wanted to take our great and good friend (and sometime commenter here) Joe DiMaggio (really, that’s his real name. I’ve seen his Texas driver’s license) with us when we went. Oh, well; another good joke spoiled.

Posted in Food | 3 Comments »

Random notes: April 11, 2010.

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

This weekend has been rather busy, so I’m a little behind in blogging.

Friday was the annual barbecue roadtrip, in which a group of us rent a nice car and drive out into the Hill Country in search of barbecue.

After the jump, photos and commentary from the roadtrip, as well as the Texas Linux Fest:

(more…)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Food, Law, linux, Loser, Obits | 1 Comment »

Food and drink notes: April 2, 2010.

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

There’s a interesting article in the LAT about why everyone hates Alice Waters. I exaggerate a bit, but there does seem to be substantial and increasing animosity to Ms. Waters.

The Caitlin Flanagan article in the Atlantic can be found here.

My own feelings about Ms. Waters and her movement are…complex, and I haven’t sorted all the way through them yet. But I do want to pull this quote for comment:

…she takes a dim view of In-N-Out, though it touts fresh ingredients and hand-cut French fries. “It’s probably better than any other chain,” she said, “but it’s not real or authentic. I’d rather eat from a street vendor in Sicily.”

  1. What does she mean by “real or authentic” in this case? What is the thing that she feels In-N-Out is trying, and failing, to replicate?
  2. My response to the “authentic” complaint is to quote Calvin Trillin in American Fried:

    When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepares a true quiche Lorraine, I always want to interrupt. “But did you like it?” I want to shout. “Did it make you happy? Did you clean your plate?” Any chance that I might someday acquire a serious interest in how closely what I ate resembled the true article disappeared one day at a block party near our house while I was eating some homemade gazpacho and talking about how it differed from the authentic gazpacho one got in Seville. The more I talked about the difference, the faster I wolfed down the gazpacho—until I realized that one way what I was eating differed from authentic gazpacho was that it tasted better.

Lawrence suggested that I might want to link to this Reason piece on the cocktail crackdown.

The makers of Tito’s Handmade Vodka have taken a plea in their pollution case.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Mixology | Comments Closed

List-O-Mania!

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Here’s an interesting list of the 100 top-grossing independent restaurants in the United States.

I’ve been to two of these: Top of the World, and Aureole. I’ve been past the Harley Davidson Cafe, repeatedly; it looks like an enormous tourist trap, and I have no desire ever to eat there.

Lawrence and I both wondered about some Austin area restaurants. It would seem that both the Oasis and the Salt Lick could make this list, but maybe they don’t cooperate with R&I, or maybe we have an exaggerated perception of the volume at both.

It is also somewhat interesting that there’s a controversy about the Republican Party holding fund raising events at Tao, the top-grossing independent in the U.S.

(By way of Althouse: the comments section on this post is worth reading.)

Posted in Clippings, Food | 2 Comments »

April Fool’s day compilation.

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I’m on the ThinkGeek mailing list. This morning, I sat down to read my email bef0re work (and coffee), and opened the latest ThinkGeek email.

“Liar’s paradox shirt? That’s okay. I’m not sure I’d buy one for myself…”

“2001 monolith action figure? 0 points of articulation? Do want.”

“Screaming chef’s knife? Interesting, but it’s probably a low-quality knife.”

“Tribbles ‘n’ Bits cereal? Ha.”

“Dharma Initiative alarm clock? Wait a minute…”

XKCD today is also geeky cool. (Edited to add 3: Our great and good friend Commvault Bryan points out that this XKCD is relevant to today’s prank.)

I’ll add to this post as I find more April Fool’s day stuff. If you’ve found something funny or interesting, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

Edited to add: This site appears to be reporting that Apple has purchased Dell. However, this is a French site, and I don’t speak their crazy moon language.

Edited to add 2: Locus Online has their April Fool pieces up. Certain writers may be familiar to some of you. (Edited to add 7: One of the Locus Online pieces gets praise on the Reason “Hit and Run” blog.)

Edited to add 4: Whole Foods Market action figures. Also, the “Don’t Eat That!” iPhone app, and featured recipes. The “Deep-fried Bacon-wrapped Bacon with Bacon Bits” sounds tasty.

Edited to add 5: My great and good friend Glen has a good one on his site. The “Lady GaGa” indeed.

Edited to add 6: PC World‘s Top Ten list. (Hattip: Mom.)

Lowering the Bar explains why they don’t have an April Fool’s Day post.

Edited to add 8: Dinosaur Comics deploys a very clever hack (see the newspost for details) that allows you to read the comic in the style of Penny Arcade. Or XKCD. Or Achewood.

Posted in Food, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 23, 2010.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Wolfgang Wagner, former director of the Bayreuth Music Festival, and grandson of Richard Wagner. The NYT obit gives a good overview of the bizarre world of Bayreuth:

In 2008, Bayreuth announced the appointment of Eva and Katharina — half-sisters more than three decades apart in age — as the festival’s co-directors. In keeping with longstanding family tradition, they had not spoken to each other in many years.

Also among the dead: Robert M. White, former X-15 pilot:

On July 17, 1962, he flew the rocket-powered X-15 plane to an altitude of 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, almost 10 miles above Earth’s atmosphere.

(Edited to add 2: Better obit from the LAT.)

Edited to add: Sort of an obit, anyway: The Hump, aka “that place that served whale sushi“, closed on Saturday. Their website makes this sound like something they did voluntarily; I am not convinced of this. The Hump was a tenant at Santa Monica Airport, which is owned by the city. The city was apparently looking into pulling The Hump’s lease. Plus there’s the whole thing about the fine for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the possible prison time. Plus there’s the whole question of whether people want to eat at a place that buys meat from a Mercedes parked behind the restaurant, instead of a legitimate restaurant supply house. (Hattip: LA Observed.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Music, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

The holidays, they come on so quickly.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I was so busy planning for today’s celebration of Pi Day (observed) that Meryl Yourish’s Eat A Tasty Animal for PETA (EATAPETA) Day almost got past me.

Almost.

I’m trying to think of what might be good for dinner. Looking at the sub-categories under “Food” gives me an idea…

Edited to add:

CrapCam!

Edited to add 2:

Keep your fork.

Posted in Food, Lobsters | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 11, 2010.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian have been engaged in a bitter antitrust dispute. The Bay Guardian argues that the Weekly was selling ads below cost in an attempt to drive the Bay Guardian out of business. So far, the Bay Guardian has prevailed, and has a $21 million judgment against the Weekly. Now, the Bay Guardian has an order awarding it half of the Weekly‘s ad revenue. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

I wanted to point out this blog post at the Public Policy In Houston blog because it expresses concisely my thoughts about public transit, and about the people who complain about America’s “love of cars”. We talk about the freedom cars give us, and that’s true; but cars also give us time. Time with our families, time to go to school, time to improve our lives. (Hattip: BlogHouston.)

On the local front, Travis County terminated their agreement with the operator of the Manchaca firehall.

And our police chief, Art Acevedo, is one of six finalists for the job of chief in Dallas. Even though he’s just a finalist at this point, the city is offering him money to stay. I’ll just point out that you may remember Chief Acevedo from previous coverage on this blog.

The various stories about the 10th anniversary of the dot-com peak didn’t amuse me that much, but I did get a kick out of this piece on the founders of Flooz. You remember Flooz, right? It was just like money, except harder to use. (ETA: I forgot that I was going to single out this quote: “In late 1999, Beenz and Flooz announced that consumers could buy Flooz with Beenz…” But was it transitive? Could you buy Beenz with Flooz? Nope.)

Merlin Olsen, for the record.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law, Obits | 2 Comments »

Random notes: March 10, 2010.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The NYT, in the person of John T. Edge, covers the breakfast taco scene in Austin.

The NYT also gives us a short piece on The Gastronomica Reader. I’m somewhat excited about this collection, as I’m a semi-regular reader of Gastronomica.

The Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood has lost its lease! Everything must go! Seriously, this is an interesting story, with overtones of “Don’t tick off the Mouse.”

Shocked, shocked I am, that movie theaters don’t want to book a movie that’s already out on DVD, even if it did win the Academy Award.

The producers of “Iron Cross” sued Variety on Tuesday, claiming the trade lured the indie film into a $400,000 promotion campaign with promises of Oscar attention that would lead to a major distribution deal — then trashing it all with a scathing review.

Edited to add: This hasn’t gotten quite the attention I expected, so I’ll throw in a couple of links to LA Observed on the whale sushi scandal. I particularly like the Jonathan Gold quote: “Restaurants resort to gimmicks generally because their chefs just aren’t very good.” You don’t say?

It is unclear if the trial will continue without Brown’s presence, because under Texas law, he may be found to have “voluntarily absenced” himself, Gotro said.

This is for values of “voluntarily absenced himself” that include shooting himself in the head, in the front yard of a witness.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Movies | 2 Comments »

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