Anna Phor

It's not so much that it's bad. It just doesn't always ... translate well. Or perhaps it just gets the local cultural influence? Lebowski's in Glasgow. IMO as a non-American, it seems typical of an "American" styled restaurant in the UK or Australia (the two places I can claim as homelands)--the execution is often much like British or Australian restaurants are in the US.

I saw basil at Dupont this morning (although maybe greenhouse grown? I didn't ask), and several folks had flowering kale (kale raab) and collards, which I don't recall seeing before.

I'm not finding it easily, but I remember reading somewhere that it was because Thursday was the traditional day to shop. That way, food was fresh for the weekend and could be prepped on Friday. So the grocery stores would run the grocery ads on Wednesdays.

Thanks all! And here's the Lynne Rosetta Kasper piece: What to do with the radish--with Deborah Madison.

There are about a billion types of radishes at Dupont Farmers market, and as we move into spring, there will be more and more. What should I do with them?

What a wonderful resource! One thing that I noticed right away about the website--as someone who is interested in eating seasonally and locally--was that despite the focus on local foods, it's not easy to discern what the particular local area of this publication is. I did sign up for the newsletter, though, and look forward to learning more from the folks involved in this!

Anyone know where to buy malt powder--the kind for making milkshakes--in DC?

Going kid-furniture shopping to Great Beginnings this afternoon--near Gaithersberg shopping center, according to google maps. Dinner recommendations? We are looking for an informal spot that would work for 2 adults and a (well socialized) 3 year old.

There's always the analog version--the chalkboard.

Then I am glad I didn't get it. I would happily have bought a smaller macaroon for less money, though! And now I have a serious chocolate craving that is an unscratched itch.

I'm currently enjoying a salmon & spinach quiche from Paul's which is delicious and just what I wanted--but I do have a question: Is it justifiable to charge six bucks for a macaroon? I actually ordered it (at the counter) and then turned it down when I learned the price. Seemed awfully steep, especially when their croissants are more like $3.50.

I think there's less room for such varied interpretation of foods as there is for varied interpretation of the arts, and I think the reason why is that eating is much more directly connected to the senses--and that human beings, as a whole, have less variation in their sensory perceptions than they do in their intellectual perceptions. Intellectual perceptions of visual objects draw on an entire range of histories, allusions, references, experiences and knowledge, and because the range is so large, each person is likely to have a unique personal combination of taste shaped by background and personality. Perhaps I love Van Gogh and despise Monet, and your taste is entirely the opposite. There's a much much smaller range of variation in terms of food. First off, the sense is just simply less fine-grained than our vision or our hearing. Second, it serves an important health purpose--there's a reason why although our tastes in artwork might vary tremendously, there's really not anybody who enjoys the taste of spoiled milk. I think these are two reasons why there's generally more convergence and consensus on what constitutes good food, and not so much in what constitutes good art! I think the proper comparison might be with futurist foods

It's been five years since I lived on that corner, but I would definitely put in a plug for Thai Chef, and also Bistrot du Coin, Zorbas, and Teaism.

We have now been twice to this neighborhood spot in Cleveland Park (Connecticut and Ordway, next to Dino's, at the site of the old Park Bench, and after that Sabores) and are thrilled with this addition to our neighborhood! St. Arnold's Mussel Bar serves moules frites, sandwiches, Belgian and Belgian-inspired beer, and brunch. The Cleveland Park location is the second for this enterprise--the first, which I haven't been to, is at 1827 Jefferson Place in south Dupont. For those who remember when this was the Park Bench, the interior space has been spruced up and scrubbed up, but the bar is still in the same spot. The back wall has small tables and benches; the window side has long communal tables with bar stools, effectively extending the sitting-at-the-bar feel across a much greater portion of the space. The huge windows facing onto Ordway are still there and this promises still to be a very pretty spot for daytime or late summer evening excursions. On our first visit we tried the Mussels St. Arnold's and the Mussels & Shrimp. The Mussels St. Arnold's come in a wonderfully satisfying creamy broth with (I'm guessing) caramelized onion, mushroom, wine (or maybe brandy) and garlic flavors. (I'm wrong. I just checked the menu which says "beer sauce." But what I wrote is what it tasted like to me. ) Mussels and shrimp, eh, I didn't love as much. The shrimp was a little overcooked and the sauce flavors didn't meld quite so much together. Second time around we went with the St. Arnold's again, and also with the Eastern Shore Mussels (Budweiser, Old Bay Corn and Red Potatoes, per the menu, and they also have sausage, which our server noted was a more recent addition by the chef). These were also very good and a nice local flavor combination. Not, however, as good as the St. Arnold's. All the mussel pots are served with bread, fries, ketchup and mayo, and run $18 a pot except Mondays when they are $10. We also split a waffle for dessert, and I think next time I might save that for a brunch visit; it was just a little too much extra heavy food on top of the fries and bread. Service was extremely warm and friendly on both visits. We went with our preschooler and were a little nervous about whether this was more of a bar or a restaurant (which is why we picked a quiet Monday for our first visit), but he was welcomed with crayons and coloring books. On our second visit, our server suggested that if we wanted, she had a soup to-go cup to contain the ample leftovers of the St. Arnold's broth, and recommended tossing it with pasta to make use of the leftovers.

Menu satire http://www.guysamericankitchenandbar.com/

John Mackey on unions: "The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover." I think that supporting workers in their right to group together and ameliorate the power imbalance between the company who has all the money and all the power and the single individual worker who has none is absolutely a key civil rights issue. It is as important to me as not discriminating against people because of their sex, race, or sexual orientation. It's the only way to break the back of generational poverty and to keep the middle class. We all owe so much to the trade union movement--the 40 week, the end to child labor, a whole slew of health and safety and anti-discrimination practices in the workplace. If my choice is between a UFCW organized shop like Safeway or Giant or a union-buster like WF then I won't shop at Whole Foods--and I haven't since the early 00s. And for city-dwellers without a car, I do recommend Peapod, where groceries are brought to your house by Teamsters.

Dupont Pain Quotidien has wifi, as does the one on 17th St north of H, although it's spotty. In Cleveland Park, the Firehook has wifi--not sure about other locations. Cafe Sorriso in Woodley Park (Calvert at Connecticut, same block as Afghan Grill). This is the sister cafe to the pizzeria in Cleveland Park, which is wifi status unknown, at least to me.

Apparently Tackle Box in Georgetown was not paying its workers? Tackle Box Restaurant Pays Up Under Pressure From DC Wage Theft Coalition I visited the Cleveland Park location several times, hoping it would get better (alas, it never did). Now I'm sorry I ever spent my money there.

I think there are fewer tables, although they may have just achieved more space by adding booths. The tables in the center of the room are more widely spaced, though. I don't know if it's objectively quieter (I don't carry a decibel measure with me!) but you can't hear the conversations of other patrons, which often bugs me more than loud ambient noise. (I dine with a small kid. A decent buzz of ambient noise is a plus, in my book--if my kid is a bit loud, it doesn't bug other people so much.) There's a private room in back, I think--and no open kitchen from the main dining room.

Oh good to know! I always had thought that za'atar was Arabic for sumac.

We visited the Woodley Park location last night. The entire interior has been redone--I'm not sure when exactly, but I think some time last year. Every time we go here, we wonder why we don't go more often. I'm perplexed by Don's comments about King of Pita, above. Lebanese Taverna serves piping hot bread fresh from their oven, and I'm assuming it's made in-house (has this not always been the case? As far as I can remember, it has.) We cleaned out the sludgy sumac-y oil dip in minutes and mused on why we don't have sumac at home (well, what *else* do you do with it?). One order of the chef's platter (a square dish with nine compartments, which houses hummous, baba ganoush, foul, tabbouleh, lebneh, kibbeh, falafel, and other delights); one of the calamari; one of the hummous trio; and the fatayer was plenty of food for our party of 2 adults and a young 'un. A mango lassi was a big hit with the kiddo, although a little sweet for my tastes. The hummous with beef was a great meld of flavours, the lebneh was deliciously creamy, and the fatayer were great although they disappeared fast. I had the knafe bel jibne for dessert, described on the menu as a "warm sweet cheese tart, golden semolina crust, sesame seed biscuit." In fact the "crust" of this tart is the cheese, which is a thin and chewy layer (of halloumi? not sure) on the bottom of a fluffy semolina filling, topped with syrup and pistachios. This was a really sophisticated meld of flavors in a sweet dish, which can be hard to come by, even in high-end restaurants. For those who remember the interior of the Woodley Park location, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised. I could hardly believe this was the same room. The room is a big, high ceilinged open space with a long bar by the hostess station at the front. Booths line the walls and the tables on the floor are nicely spaced, which is lovely--I always felt cramped in the old configuration.

These guys also do the best version of a flat white in the area. As opposed to the only version of a flat white in the area? If anyone else is serving flat whites or long blacks, this Australian coffee drinker wants to know!

Highlights of our recent trip to Edinburgh—we were there for Hogmanay (that’s New Year’s Eve to the uninitiated) and a family wedding. We were staying in a rented apartment just under the castle, so most of our dining trips were centered around the Royal Mile, the grassmarket, and Princes Street. Notes below are in order that we visted them because that’s the easiest way for me to remember them all! I’ll also mention that a lot of these restaurants don’t have websites, but I’ve hyperlinked the ones that do. We came in on a redeye and started our day with a long nap and then a late lunch at the Deacon’s House Cafe (304 Lawnmarket, at the corner of Bank Street). This is a tearoom where you sit at a table but order from the counter, which is downstairs. At 3pm, the wait in line to order was excrutiatingly long—around 25 minutes. The cafe offers fairly plain pre-prepared sandwiches (in general, sandwiches in the UK are not served with the kinds of standard additions like lettuce, tomato, mustard, mayo, that one might find in the US). A smoked salmon sandwich on brown bread and a decent cup of coffee served the purpose of fueling the body and marginally conquering the jetlag, but the service issues left us feeling out of sorts and not on the whole impressed. Dinner that evening was at The Outsider (15 George IV Bridge). Would definitely recommend this to folks visiting Edinburgh. The menu has a very modern sensibility but also incorporates traditional Scottish foods, and is heavy on fish dishes. I had a cod dish served in a creamy leek broth—my major critique of this dish is that it’s not quite sure if it’s a soup or not, and needs either to transform into a thicker sauce or to be served letting the soup be a soup, with bread or some other soup-sopping instrumentality on the plate. I also had a fennel and orange salad as I was sharing my main with a child (and there is no kids menu here). Dessert was a chocolate mousse pave with molasses ice cream, and the dessert menu in general had the same creative impetus as the savories—a heavy regional influence on modern trends. The menu also carries a large selection of whiskies at extremely reasonable prices. (Extremely. Lagavulin 16 for about $6 a serve.) For lunch the next day, we wandered into the Grassmarket, in search of a pub lunch. We unfortunately ran into a difficulty with Scottish licensing laws that was to plague is throughout our visit; namely that there are many many establishments which are not permitted to serve children under 14. After our 3 year old saw us 86’d from a lovely spot at a wide oak table by a fire, we were directed to The Black Bull (12 Grassmarket), which does allow young children and also has a kids’ menu. This pub offers a perfectly standard Scottish pub lunch menu, executed just as one would expect, and so I had a Proustian plate of scampi and chips, which was my go-to pub lunch when we would go out with my grandparents on a Sunday afternoon. The stand-out meal of this trip was lunch at The Scottish Cafe and Restaurant (http://www.centotre.com/thescottishcafe/lunch/) at the Scotland National Gallery. Tucked in underneath the gallery, and with outdoor seating on Princes Street Gardens (although not in January), the cafe offers traditional Scottish food, perfectly executed, and is an ideal spot for family gatherings, with a children’s menu on hand. They offer breakfast, lunch, and high tea. My starter here was a light and fluffy mackerel pate, followed by delectable and extremely lean wild duck (the menu comes with a disclaimer that game meat may contain buckshot shrapnel). If you did not grow up in the UK, you probably don't know the sheer unadulterated joy that a knickerbocker glory can bring to a summer afternoon. My favorite version was from Nardini's (http://www.nardinis.co.uk/) in Largs, but I'm sure there are other good versions. The version served by the Scottish Cafe was not, alas, as glorious as it might have been. (Not enough layers! And needs more raspberry sauce!) Our final restaurant meal was at La Rusticana (http://larusticanauk.com/), a straightforward red sauce Italian spot.This was a family outing with a large party, so we were more focused on the company than the food--however, they DID have a very decent knickerbocker glory, much to the delight of the youngest member of our party, who finished the evening covered in ice cream and clutching a giant lollipop tucked into his hand by a very kind waiter. Finally--from a native Scot--some things you should try while you are in Scotland. I'm sure your guidebook mentions haggis with tatties and neeps, and cullen skink, and cranachan. But make sure you get yourself some tablet; a buttery fudge candy that crumbles in your mouth. Millionaire's shortbread is a shortbread slice covered in soft caramel with a hard chocolate shell on top. A real Scottish pie is made from ground mutton and comes in a single-serve size, with two-piece circular crust, pinched at the edges with a little hole on top. Oatcakes go well with any kind of cheese and should be more widely known outside of Scotland than they are. And if you drink soda, Irn Bru is a national institution.

Have you looked at batchgeo as a tool for this? (http://batchgeo.com/) It integrates map-making with spreadsheet data, so you prep a spreadsheet with your map co-ordinates and any other data that you'd like to have attached to the map (so e.g. restaurant name, thread URL, restaurant website ... whatever you like), then you just copy/paste the spreadsheet in the window and it spits out a google-maps based end product with mouse-overable data associated with each map point. Pros: you can add a bunch of data very very quickly with this. Cons: I'm not sure how easy it is to edit/make additions to maps which are already online. I've only used it for "finished" sets of data unlikely to have further additions. You may also be able to map multiple categories (so coffee shops in blue, bars in green, etc), although I don't believe you can have clickable filters to just see whatever category you want to the exclusion of others. On the free version, there's a limit to the number of points you can add (but it's a big limit). There's also a mobile app.

(But I'm wrong in the thread title. Which I realized immediately AFTER I hit "post".)