RWBooneJr

Just a few notes on Fig and Olive. ...

What you describe sounds fairly typical for a restaurant with eight locations in four states.  It appears that management knows what they're doing, and that the DC branch will likely be as good as the New York ones.  Hopefully they found someone for the position who's a better fit for their world.

I live about a hundred yards from the Uptown original.  It's above average, even by New York standards, and a fairly good value for its price point.  It'll be a good addition to DC.  That said, I rarely go to the one near me -- I like the food, but it has *literally* the least comfortable bar stools I have ever encountered.  They may be fine if you're 5'4" and female, but I'm not.  Picture a bear on a tricycle and you get the idea.

Or the press reports...
 
Or the documents...
 
Move along...

"Every Last Bit" by Mark Bittman on nytimes.com

I also looked at whether it might be available on Nexis, but the database only goes back to 2008.

I just had a great dinner at Recette in the West Village. It's very casual and not that expensive (the a la carte small plates are fairly big).

I Goggled the recipe and the earliest dated reference I found was January 27, 1996. I would go to a library and work back from that date.

... while it may not be the best Peking Duck in town ...

It can be, depending on when you go and who you're with.

Sietsema's two star review of the new restaurant is up. However, this summary on DCDiningGuide provides additional helpful details that Sietsema glosses over, like what you'll actually get and how much it will cost.

This site is perpetually slow on loading, on switching pages, on almost any action.

I suspect that the board's cache isn't set up properly or the indexes are wrong.

Today, Eater published a list of highlights from message boards with a couple from ours.

Say what?

I thought that LTHForum had died? Did someone resurrect it?

It was put up for sale in 2011 and bought by three members. It was updated in 2013, but I don't think it was ever offline. The forum is still fairly active.

Curious how many other 'regional' food/dining related sites there are out there like DR is for the greater DC metro to get the real skinny on places when planning out of town dining.

Mouthfuls in New York and LTHForum in Chicago are the two big ones. PHXFoodNerds in Phoenix is another. There have got to be more -- Chowhound's uncurated, everything in one thread approach makes it largely useless and Egullet's dining forums have mostly died out.

If you want to get really pissed off, calculate the markup on beer. There are 124 pints in a keg.

If anyone cares, Westover Beer Garden v. 2.0 will be named Sehkraft Beer Garden and Haus (sehkraft means "vision," as in eyesight -- not sure that's what they meant). This was announced in July, but it's topical because the brewpub has a hearing tonight about its music permit. The County Manager is recommending that the permit be issued, but that their request that they be allowed to keep their doors open during performances be denied. Here's a link to the permit application.

On a related note, the space still appears to be empty, so I doubt the planned March opening will happen.

[ETA: Updated with additional info.]

Google has just changed the way one sees results when searching for a restaurant (or a hotel, or a nightclub, etc).

They actually started rolling this out last week. It's very much a "screw the little guy" move, because the new "3-pack" is much larger than the former Carousel, crowding out listings that aren't in the top three (the 3-pack appears after these). It bumps a lot of results to the second page.

So Monty's steak is 10% cheaper, 10% bigger, dry-aged (is Rural Society's dry-aged?), and comes choice of side order (with any second side order only $4 more) - that's a huge difference in price. You can do the math, but any way you do it, it won't be pretty.

The 12oz strip loin at Rural Society says it's dry aged, but that's the only cut on the menu that touts its aging. At $55, it's also the most expensive item offered. The 12oz ribeye I had ($42) was supposedly grass fed and from Uruguay, but it wasn't very distinctive or flavorful, beyond being very salty. I suppose it's possible that all of that salt masked the meat's flavor.

This is a good restaurant, worthy of the 2.5 stars that Tom Sietsema gave it -- at least for much of the menu. All of our meat tonight -- though still good -- was oversalted. Even without that, Rural Society is vastly overpriced. Everything should either be 30% cheaper or a third better. Go for happy hour and stick to appetizers. Beyond that, you'll get a much better steak for the price at Ray's...or maybe any good steakhouse.

There's still an old-school steakhouse culture in this town, but it's a hell of a lot smaller than most "big city" chefs seem to think. In any event, even that crowd would never go this far up 15th for an average steak when there is as good or better on Pennsylvania Avenue. There's certainly enough other good stuff at this restaurant to draw attention. Garces should highlight those things instead of average, overpriced beef.

I actually did like the restaurant. But, if I went again, I wouldn't even think about ordering another pricey steak. The beef just isn't worthy of the hefty price tag.

A little tip for those in Clarendon: the drip coffee at Northside is good, but South Block (11th & Garfield) has the best. As far as I know, they don't have any espresso or coffee drinks (it's mostly a smoothie/wrap place), and there's little room to sit, but it's much faster than waiting in line at Northside. I don't recall where they get their beans.

[Dialing a rotary phone] interrupts the direct electrical current of the telephone line (local loop) a specific number of times for each digit and thereby generates electrical pulses which the telephone exchange decodes into each dialed digit.

See more here and here. Note "tapping" in the latter.

Don: Tapping the receiver accomplishes exactly the same thing as would dialing a rotary phone, which relies on "clicks" to represent numbers (breaks in the dial tone). So you were just making long distance calls, not free ones. The operator would probably pick up on occasion because you did something that confused the system, so your call was transferred for assistance. Touch tone replaced the clicks in the 60's, but the old system still worked for a long time after that. It may still work, for all I know.

Michael: I believe the central offices are still used as such. My guess is that the switches housed inside have gotten much smaller over time, but demand has increased requiring more equipment at each location. There's also a ton of cable involved, which takes up a lot of space. In any event, I can't recall seeing a new central office being built anywhere, or an old one demolished. You can generally tell a central office because it either doesn't have windows or has windows with nothing behind them (i.e. the "empty looking buildings" you and Don reference). Here is a link to pictures of a few.

I favor rinsing the ice with vermouth...

Precisely, although you get largely the same effect with less waste from coating the sides of a freezer-chilled glass with vermouth and dumping the few extra drops that remain.

This is a very refreshing, very strong drink -- plus a snack, if garnished with good olives. Sometimes that's just what you need, though it's almost necessarily a one and done for me. I scoff at those who say it isn't a "real martini." It was for 50 years, before a bunch of hipsters discovered some very old cocktail books.

I like mine with vodka. I'm basically James Bond.

That is the quote of the day, all day, any day. Simpler things in life should not be so hard to attain.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a good "dry" martini these days? Not the new/old vermouth-heavy versions, but the 90's-throwback, glass-of-booze kind. I'm astonished that anyone could screw up a drink with essentially one ingredient, but it happens all the time.

And the drug they are most famously associated with as a band historically is LSD.

This is part of the reason that working security at a Dead show was so strange.

So when Dylan proposed to join the Dead as a member in 1989 he was doing it for the pot?

No, he did that for the opportunity to collaborate with some great musicians. It's the same reason he was playing with the Traveling Wilburys at that time.

Pot explains the cultural phenomenon that the Dead became. It has nothing to do with their music. Actually, their most famous drug-reference song is about cocaine.