sheldman

3 hours ago, noamb said:

Apologies for perhaps slightly hijacking his thread, but does anyone have any related suggestions (12 adults, not too casual - think work related gathering, some vegetarians) in Alexandria (or National Harbor)?  Needs to accommodate a vegetarian or two, several with unknown tastes (so trying to avoid too intense spicing like Indian or Thai), as well as people who actually like food and would really rather not be stuck eating someplace overpriced and mediocre in national harbor.  I’ve looked through the menu for everyplace I could think of (good to mediocre) in Old Town and could barely find any that had more than one veg main, and even that often felt like an afterthought. Finally, it also needs to be open Monday (which excludes Vaso’s on King).

           Thanks,

           Noam

Could you get them to Jaleo in Crystal City?

8 hours ago, Pat said:

How many people have worked there 15 years?

7 hours ago, DonRocks said:

Are you raising the possibility I think you are? ("No comment" is a perfectly acceptable reply.)

I will go ahead and say that I was pondering whether to raise that possibility, knowing of the restaurant only what I have learned by reading this site for many many years.

Science proved them wrong!  Except that "science" did this experiment using COURIER for pete's sake, and so it proves nothing about any font that people actually use. 

21 hours ago, Pat said:

I'd check with your top choices to see if they could accommodate the vegetarian teens without making them feel awkward. Since definitions of vegetarianism vary, do they eat fish/seafood? 

Thank you.  Yeah if they were fish-acceptant this would be much easier.  But I think dietary preferences are cool so I don't mind.  

It falls to me to make reservation (for June, don't worry) for special occasion dinner for 7 in the District.  Not really worried about price because I am not paying   Only trick is that youngest generation is vegetarian while oldest generation is decidedly not.  Online menus or sample menus at Metier, Kinship, and Mirabelle suggest practically nothing for the teen vegetarians.  And I would prefer not to put them in the awkward position of having to ask for something off-menu (and would optimally prefer that they have actual options rather than both having to order "the one vegetarian app and the one vegetarian main").  But along the lines of those restaurants, is there a place that is GREAT these days and would fit the bill better, making both the traditionalist grandparents and the young veges happy and making me happy because the food is awesome?  Or am I underestimating how accommodating Kinship or Mirabelle, for instance, would want to be?  Thank you.

Who could possibly have imagined that a guy who became famous for being a sexist jerk would be a sexist jerk? (In this, I mean to be criticizing not only the sexist jerk, but those who, for profit, enabled his rise from "just a jerk who's a good chef at somebody else's restaurant" to "celebrity with lots of restaurants".)  So, for instance, thanks so much, Eater, for distancing yourself after years of puffery.

I went a couple of days ago for the first time in a long time and it was absolutely delicious.  A catfish soup (Orm) was the highlight, a real depth of flavor.  Also a delicious and subtle rice noodle soup with tofu (khao piak sen). Oddly, the only available beer was Corona but I managed.

I love this website. Thank you Don.

I had never heard of Sun Noodles until astrid's post.  Bought a miso-broth pack at Hana (nominally a two-portion pack) and stretched it for four people by adding lots of stuff (corn, fake ground beef, leftover spinach, leftover enoki, nori, eggs, butter).  Really good noodles and VERY surprisingly good broth.

Thanks to all.

(edited quickly to add for Don: Roll Tide!)

13 hours ago, DonRocks said:

... I'm also not convinced it's made in each store; it makes more sense to have it shipped in from a central location for consistency. Assuming that's true, it's the individual stores' primary responsibility to serve it at the correct freshness and temperature, and of course with friendly service.

I asked a couple of weeks ago, and they do not make it in DC.  It is shipped in.  And as much as I hate to disagree with Marty about anything, I believe it is worth $12/pint. When Ben and Jerry go for $4 to $5, and taste like nothing, this is worth splurging on.  Also, in my experience (after many visits) the people working at the local store are kind and helpful and funny.

I think I was more annoyed, than anything. Annoyed at the fact that, in a menu that seems large and varied, there was barely anything that called to me. Filling up on sushi (rolls or nigiri) looked like it would entail a choice between "pedestrian and pretty expensive" and "very expensive."  Things designated as "entrees" read to me, for the most part, like "slab of protein from huge wholesaler, raised to the highest price the market will bear."  It felt to me like the epitome of what bugs me about NW DC, west of Rock Creek: expensive food, neither comforting nor interesting nor good-ingredient-focused.

And there are few things that I love more than leftover food of any Asian cuisine, eaten cold for breakfast. From the crappiest delivery Chinese to the fanciest, give it to me cold for breakfast. But that leftover udon in broth has been sitting in my refrigerator looking at me ever since, and I just can't bring myself to do it. It felt like dishwater with bok choy.

Cathedral Commons Raku.  Seems successful.  Sadly, not good.   Just dull flavors in the agedashi tofu and in udon bowl.   Dull, dull, dull.  Tried to convince myself it was subtle.  No, just dull.  But making $$$ apparently.  Yay,

Kanji-Kana is a very sweet and welcoming place on the 3rd floor of 1018 Vermont Ave. NW.  I went today for the first time because I had to be downtown all day for boring seminar, ugh. This review by Tim Carman gives a good explanation of what is wonderful and what is acceptable about it. I will not say that the ramen was particularly great, but the experience was in fact great: a quiet, sweet, and welcoming place with a warm bowl of noodles. Their website is a weird little thing powered by GrubHub for some reason. All I'm saying is that on a day when you are downtown and want a quick respite with some very decent food and a lovely vibe, check it out.

5 hours ago, DonRocks said:

Hypothesis: No President should be allowed to nominate a Supreme Court Justice after March 15th during a Presidential election year.

Discuss: Why or why not?

Any such rule would require a constitutional amendment. (Short of a constitutional amendment, the Senate could adopt a rule that it won't consider a nominee put forward after some arbitrary date in an election year; but any such rule could be changed to fit the political winds of the moment, so it wouldn't really be a reliable rule.) And if we want to think about possible constitutional amendments to reduce the influence of past presidents over the future by reducing the longevity or number of their Supreme Court appointments, let's think about those in bigger terms. The obvious proposal would be fixed terms.

On 9/14/2017 at 10:19 PM, Ericandblueboy said:

No matter where you go, whether it's the grocery store, fast food joint, or the Smithsonian Zoo, you may be asked whether you want to donate $1 to such and such charity.

As a tax lawyer, this galls me.  If you donate $1 to charity directly and you itemize, then the charity gets $1, you get $1 of tax deduction (provided you itemize), and Uncle Sam basically chips in the income tax you would've otherwise paid.

But if you give $1 to Safeway, the charity still gets $1, but it's Safeway who now gets a $0.3 to $.35 in tax benefit.  So when a retailer solicits you for a donation, they're really asking you to give it 30 to 35 cents per dollar donated.  

When it's the charity such as the zoo asking for the money, you're simply missing out on your deduction.

Give directly to a charitable organization!

I am not a tax lawyer.  But are you really sure that the bolded part is right?  If so, it would be such a bizarre corporate give-away that it would make an easy cause for a crusading politician or reformer. And it just doesn't make sense given basic principles of US taxation: for what you say to be true, it would have to be true (wouldn't it?) (1) that (e.g.) Safeway doesn't have to declare the donations as income (or whatever the corporate tax analogous word is) but does get to declare the donations-passed-through as deductions - which is crazy, and (2) that Safeway's marginal tax rate is about the same as the top individual marginal tax rate (and that's not true, is it?).

I wandered in today for the first time, debating with myself whether to eat some animal, and found a vegetarian sandwich on the specials menu: smoked spaghetti squash, vinegar sauce, cole slaw, and avocado on a potato roll.  Wow was it a good sandwich - good in concept and good in execution.  Here is an imperfect picture from their instagram.

On 8/26/2017 at 10:39 PM, Ericandblueboy said:

 The mom's traditional lagman had wonderful texture but the kids complained that the dish as a whole was too bland.  And the stir-fried bok choy was just bad Chinese food.

This is the best Uyghur restaurant in DC because it's the only Uyghur restaurant in DC.  I've had Chinese muslim food that blows this away. 

Funny, I went there last night for the first time and my impression was similar but with a positive spin.  Wow the house-made noodles I had were so good in texture. The rest of the dish was not terribly exciting - tasty but not mind-expanding - but wow those noodles. And I don't know whether other less-exciting aspects of the food were "authentic" (a troubled concept but somewhat useful) or were dumbed-down due to ingredient constraints or market forces. Also a lovely conversation with the staff about Uyghur culture, demographics, and history, of which I knew very little. Having just spent a weekend in NY wandering around among noodle restaurants, eating a bit here and a bit there, I am more positive-minded about the concept of popping in to a restaurant that does at least one thing (like house-made noodles) very well. I will go back many times and get a noodle dish and some smashed cucumbers and will be happy.

It's a funny twist on competition vs monopoly/simplicity. For customers, it would be lovely to have a site that showed ALL restaurants taking online reservations in the area, so you could scroll through and see what your options are. OpenTable seemed to be that for a while. It is not that, any longer. This is a loss for customers, in an oversimplified sense, to have competition - because we weren't the ones who were DIRECTLY paying for the service. (Instead it was the restaurants who were paying.)

Someone will maybe figure out how to make a website that will aggregate OpenTable + Resy + Yelp availability, so that the customer can again scroll through all options in one site - maybe making $ through ads or whatever.

2 minutes ago, Pat said:

Was the cottage cheese mixed into the collards?  That's the dish I remember most from the old Red Sea, and I have not been able to find it anywhere else.  I'm looking forward to heading here soon.

Was not mixed in - was an extra ordered side, just cheese. Was really good on its own. Mixing with the collards is a great idea. Next time!

(1) I have never heard anyone suggest that, either from an "original understanding" perspective or from current perspective, the difference between AND and OR there is of any importance.  You are right that it does seem a little odd - you've got three sets of two, with the first two being "OR" sets and the third one being an "AND" set.  I would guess that it just seemed to flow better off the tongue that way, given that the last of the three sets is PRECEDED by an "OR" (because Congress can't do set one, set two, OR set three) and then another "OR" after that would just maybe sound funny.

(2) What we call "separation of church and state" colloquially is mostly understood by most people, I think, as the first clause, the Establishment Clause. (That doesn't mean "establish" in the way you later use it ("... should a new religion be established ..."). It refers instead to "establishment" in the sense of designating an official state religion. 

As for your further question - about free exercise - it's complicated and debated. No one thinks that you could declare yourself the leader of a new religion that involves human sacrifice, and get away with it. The Supreme Court held (5-4) in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) that a state could ban peyote use and - most important - didn't have to allow such use by people for whom it is a religious sacrament. Some people still think that's wrong as a matter of constitutional law. Congress, and lots of states, have since enacted laws that (in grossly oversimplified summary) allow religious exemptions from generally-applicable laws unless there is a compelling government justification for not allowing such an exemption. So, human sacrifice is still a no-go. People are always trying to litigate claims that, as Rastafarian or other more obscure religion, they have the right to smoke pot.

You might ask, "well if Employment Division v Smith is correct, then does the "free exercise" clause mean anything at all?" Yes it does. It still prohibits laws that are either designed to target a specific religion's practices, or that would ban a specific religion outright (something that was unthinkable in this country for some decades of the 20th century so it may be hard for people of our generation to see why you even need to think about prohibiting such a law, but this was not always so.)

Dammit where is MartyL when you need him ...

I was there tonight in the new Adams Morgan location, eating vegetarian sampler plus homemade cottage cheese, and lentil sambusa.  Delicious food, happy open space, and friendly staff.  Wonderful.

I have a friend coming to town who runs a small wine bar in another part of the country. Friend has asked where to go in DC for a really good wine bar, to try things, swap information with owner/staff, and have fun.

I am old enough to know about Cork and Proof, which I assume are still good.

Are there other places I should be thinking about? Am looking in the District proper, with good wines by the glass that would be interesting to someone who knows what they are talking about.  Not looking for fancy restaurant that will serve mainly expensive old French things. Nor am I looking for some place that serves cheap-ass wine in mason jars for the sake of cuteness. Looking for a place that has good wines that are not seen everywhere, even unusual, in reasonable price range, that would provide fun, comfort, and useful information for somebody who runs a similar bar elsewhere in the country.

Is there such a place these days? Thanks.

White Sulphur Springs

If you can, be sure to take the tour of the underground structure that was designed to house the US Congress in case of nuclear war.

7 hours ago, DonRocks said:

The Earl of Sandwich... almost surely would have eaten a banger on a roll.

Yeah but he would have eaten pigs in blankets too (if the outsides weren't too greasy) and there is no way in the world that a pig in a blanket is a sandwich. Don! Stand up for reason please as the world crumbles around us!

I am generally a descriptivist when it comes to grammar and definitions.  But dammit some few things are right and wrong, and this is one of them.

Now if you sliced your frankfurter into three lengthwise slices and put your toppings of choice in the bun with it, then it would be ok to call it a sandwich.

Hot dogs are not sandwiches.

A hot dog bun filled with chicken salad is, at least arguably, a sandwich.

A Hebrew National between two pieces of bread would not be a sandwich. It would be a silly thing, perhaps edible, but just too silly to exist.

Chicken salad, formed into a cylinder and held together in that shape with some binding agent, between two pieces of bread, would not be a sandwich. It would be an absurdity.