Spiral Stairs

I just had a conversation with my wife about eating "bunnies," which she's never done. I forced her into a corner by reminding her how cute and smart pigs are, yet how tasty bacon and other forms of pig meat are. I also reminded her of the weekend we spent at a bed-and-breakfast on a working farm (Smithfield Farm, in Berryville, Virginia), where we befriended a cute little cow, named Sally, whose destiny was no doubt macabre. Nevertheless, she remains convinced that bunnies are too cute to eat. Just to push her buttons, I usually call hamburgers "cow sandwiches," and bacon, "sliced pig."

Would it be too much trouble for him to use boldface, italics, underlining, or blinking neon red arrows to separate the names of the restaurants from the narrative? Sheesh. My eyes and brain hurt in equal amounts after plowing through a portion of that list. It is interesting, though. I'll be dining at one of the Afghan places he mentioned (Faryab) this weekend, and I don't think I've ever had Afghan food...

That much I can handle. Thanks!

I see Eve has wasted no time in capitalizing on Sietsema's "gastronomic epiphany" characterization. My first epiphany there shall take place in the tasting room on November 1, for our second anniversary dinner. Gah! I'm drooling now. Will I feel weird if I don't wear a jacket? Because I hate wearing a jacket. And I hate ties even more, so please don't tell me I have to wear one of those.

This piqued my interest, and resurrected distant memories of reading of this dispute, so I did a little Googling. The "local competitor" that Potbelly is suing is "Coggins Sandwich Manufactory," which is actually owned by a Cleveland-based company called Farro Enterprises, which in turn "owns 10 T.G.I. Friday's franchises in Northeast Ohio and 18 Baja Fresh Mexican Grill restaurants on the West Coast. Farro also is a major shareholder in Baja Fresh stores in Oregon and Washington state." Further, "Farro plans up to 16 stores within four years in the D.C. market. All will be corporately owned.... The company plans to have locations in at least one other major East Coast city in three years." Which sandwich shop is David and which is Goliath is debatable, it seems to me. I generally trust the legal system to determine which lawsuits are frivolous, anyway.

My wife and I went to Tysons last Saturday and found it to be an unpleasant experience of cosmic proportions. First, it took us a half-hour of patrolling the parking structure to find a spot. It was like Lord of the Flies in there; social niceties did not exist. Every open space was like the last morsel of food in an arena of starving people. You just had to hope you were in right place at the right time, and further that no one bullied you out of their way with a giant SUV. Once inside, we fought our way through slow-moving, meandering crowds to the new wing. Whoever decided to put the food court and movie theater on a level accessible by only three escalators (and no stairs) was stupendously stupid. When we were there, two escalators were going up -- so getting up to that level wasn't so bad. But only one escalator was going down. There was a line probably 50 yards long just to get on the one frickin' escalator. The food court was absolutely mobbed. We wanted to go Five Guys, but it was surrounded by less of a line and more of a throbbing mass of sweaty humanity. So we left. Yuck. I might go back at a less popular time, but man, did that experience turn us off.

My wife and I tried Sonoma for the first time on Sunday evening. We live a few blocks away, so it is something of a tragedy that we hadn't gotten there sooner. We started with a two-cheese plate -- a goat cheese and an Italian cow's milk cheese. Both were good, but my tendency toward gluttony wished the hunks were bigger. Luckily, two excellent salads followed. My wife had the tomato-and-mozzarella, which looked beautiful and tasted just as good. I liked the sprinkling of halved grape tomatoes around the edge. My salad was a pile of greens with a goodly and correct amount of vinegary dressing. I had the ribeye on polenta. (Is this a different dish from the London Broil discussed above?) A few bites were a little chewy, but the beef and polenta were both tasty. My wife had the burger, which she wolfed down in record time, with only minor assistance from me. The little cubed roasted potatoes were unexciting. But I helped her finish them off anyway. For dessert, we had the chocolate cake and the pistacchio ice cream. Mmm. Simple and effective. I loved being able to order so many wines by the glass, as my wife rarely drinks enough to justify a whole bottle. Service was efficient if not especially warm. And the space is tight but beautiful. It felt very much like a number of places in my old NYC stomping grounds. My wife is threatening go back during the day with an armload of paint swatches so she can find a match for Sonoma's blue-gray walls and apply it to our bedroom walls. I say, more power to her -- as long as she's doing the painting.

I view Potbelly as quite a value, even though I am willing to be repulsed by the "flair" that adorns the walls in formulaic, corporate-home-office-prescribed patterns. I have eaten their chicken salad sandwiches many times, and have been pleased. The efficiency of the operation is mind-boggling -- I used to work a few blocks from the Chinatown location, and the lunchtime lines would snake around all the way out the front door. But, somehow, the line moved. And they never messed up on my requested ingredients. (It helps that they assemble the sandwich literally in front of you.) Then again, I've been known to eat at McDonald's, so my opinion may not be worth the greasy wax paper it's written on.