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I was in Union Market on a non-lunch related errand this afternoon and the line for people waiting to sit was easily 15 deep at 12:15 (it was more of scrum than a line, though). It definitely is an odd set up, and not a place you would ever be able to linger over lunch. If the ramen is good and you're flying I guess who cares!

The best part is that they probably got Light Horse and Iron Horse mixed up. "Hey, hon, what was the name of that place we went in D.C. where I got that sandwich I didn't like? The horsey one. Sumthin' Horse? Hmm, looks like there's an Iron Horse around there, that's probably it. Can't wait to give them a piece of my mind!"

Aritsugu? I had read up on it and planned a trip to the market just for that shop, but my jaw about dropped when I got in the store. They spent a half hour with me trying out different debas, and eventually talked me into a smaller and less expensive knife than I had originally budgeted for! Even if your last name doesn't translate into a cool symbol , they will stamp a phonetic translation in katakana. Korin carries a small selection of their blades. Have you been to DC Sharp recently? Compared to Korin, etc. their selection is "small", but it's easily the best in the metro area. Only about half of the knives seem to be Japanese made, but there are some incredible blades from American bladesmiths (some Japanese-trained) that I wouldn't overlook.

If they were interspersed with the main forum, could we flag them such that non-DC posts were easier to spot (link color? icon?) I have family in both of the cities under consideration, but my main use for the Shopping forum is to find products that are available closer than a long drive up 95.

How about an out-of-town Shopping sub-forum like the current Farmer's Market one? Grouping them together until there is critical mass for dedicated NYC/Philly sub-forums could keep the volume at a respectable level while not diluting the DC-centric nature of the main forum.

I made an awesome Asian-influenced watermelon salad earlier this summer (alas, I don't remember the source of the recipe; it was a magazine tear out that I followed loosely). Think fish sauce, chili paste, a dash of soy, crispy fried scallions and mint + Thai basil. The salty/sweet/sour/spicy combo was a great BBQ side dish. If I had to do it again I would use a *slightly* underripe melon. If you don't toss it immediately prior to serving is gets mushy. Or I guess you could precut the watermelon and let the cubes drain in a colander (saving the juice to incorporate into the dressing).

Well, I have some real sweet search skills since I apparently forgot a post I made in this very thread! It seems to be a moot point anyway since another fishmonger is reported ready to go into UM this fall.

The article touches on this rather extensively, and I think you can't overlook how much value consciousness plays a role here. As much or more so than novelty-aversion or other psychological explanations in my opinion. Chains can offer a LOT of food for a relative bargain. This reminds me of a conversation I had with friends in college waaaayyyy back when Domino's first started offering their thin crust pizzas. At the time any style was the same price: thin crust, regular or deep dish. In the world of Domino's crust options the thin crust was clearly the best tasting one, with the deep dish option the worst by a large margin (this is not debatable ). One friend would ALWAYS order deep dish though. One night when pressed for why he always made agreeing on an order such a pain in the ass, he said, "Deep dish is such a better value!". Even though he agreed that the thin crust tasted better, there was no getting over the price-per-pound value that deep dish offered; you could stretch that pie into more meals. Long discussion ensued, but for him it still came down to calories-per-dollar trumping everything else. I don't think you can easily overlook this mentality among the dining public.

Sorry, that should have read: Cooking at home will always be cheaper than the same item eaten at a restaurant, the question becomes where to put the tipping point. Fast food is probably the murkiest realm from which to address this question since is conflates a lot of non-food related cultural issues, but my point was that wherever you put the value the difference will literally be in pennies. So, thought experiment! Say you were going to make a comparison between what it costs for a restaurant to produce a single meal vs. what it would cost you to do it at home. Some constraints on this thought experiment to get to the core cost differential: 1) This meal will be served in your dining room; we can factor out the additional overhead that a restaurant incurs by running a large dining room. 2) Attached to your dining room are two magic portals: one leading to the fully equipped restaurant kitchen designed to pump out this meal, and the other leading to an equally-sized kitchen space that is only equipped with your current cooking implements and appliances in one small, pathetic corner. With these parameters to start with, how much more cheaply could your produce any given restaurant's cuisine such that it could pass a culinary Turing test? At what point does your meager equipment start showing through and force some upgrades (which must be paid for and accounted for in your final meal cost)?

This is pretty interesting, and I suspect there is some sort of bell curve in cost differential at play. Even if you exclude things like paying for gas to drive a car to go shopping and actually having a kitchen in the first place, there is probably a sweet spot where home cooking is maximally less expensive (yes, I just wrote that) than eating out. There is no way I could beat a $1 fast food burger unless the whole family ate one for every meal for a week so we could achieve some economy of scale, and even then we are talking pennies. Mid-level casual sit down (chain and mom 'n' pop alike)? Sure, I think this is where your dollar buys you the LEAST compared to preparing at home. As you get towards real high end or specialty cuisine or molecular gastronomy I think the chart would trend back the other way. I suspect wholesale or commercial prices for a lot of high end ingredients are markedly different than retail, and not just as a dollar figure to account for higher pricing but on a percentage basis, too (those in the biz, please back me up here!). And there are direct production-related costs you would have to amortize: does that meal require a sophisticated sous vide cooker to pull off? How much do PacoJets run these days? And if you take all of the trappings of high-end dining rooms off the balance sheet for a restaurant the home cook is even worse off!

If you ever take a weekend to go down to the Eastern Shore, Peppers is located at the northern edge of the outlet centers near Rehoboth Beach. I think they can still claim the largest retail selection of hot sauces in the country.

We find ourselves at UM at least once a week, usually on a weekend morning to get coffee and browse about. The only grocery shopping we really do there is at Harvey's (if we ate more red meat I'd probably add Red Apron). That and the occasional purchase at Righteous Cheese. There was talk several months back (of course I can't find the link now, and Google is failing me) that Spike Gjerde was going to have a hand in a locally-focused seafood stall which would be incredible, but with the work he's doing on the Food Hub that may be off the table. That and a competing produce stand would get us in to shop more often during the week. Even with the disappointment over the retail selection I'm really happy to spend my money there in other ways. And judging by the crowds EVERY single time we're there others agree. At first I groaned at the kitschy temporary-lawn-and-cocktail-trailer Suburbia gimmick. That was before last Saturday's afternoon spent relaxing and drinking amidst other families and groups of friends hanging out in the perfect weather. You can even buy wine or six packs from the retailer inside and do your own picnic lunch as we saw lots of people doing. You'll know where to find us this weekend!

I wouldn't ascribe any seismic shift in the Post's food writing based on this one week. One of the most common complaints in Tom's chats (although I suspect lots of them are trolls who stumbled their way over from the comments sections on the political blogs) is, "You only ever review this high-falutin' food, when will you review restaurants for REAL AMERICANS!". Or something like that. I think this package of articles, and especially TS' contribution, nicely addresses what is a pretty big gap between their coverage and the interests of a not-insignificant portion of their readership. They lay out what separates the chains from the food they focus on and, more importantly, WHY that is the focus. The touches about how independent "good restaurants" can learn from the chains is a nice twist, and it softens the overarching message: we don't write about chain food because with very few exceptions it just isn't interesting or dynamic enough. Column inches about predictable food would be, well, predictable. I do like the discussion about how chains are feeling the heat and adapting to appear a little less cookie cutter (but in ways that wouldn't drive away their base)

In Firefox it's just Options > Options > Show Cookies then search for the site string you want and blamm-o. I can't speak to Safari since I don't use it, but there should be some way to delete granular data like that (and if "it doesn't actually delete cookies you delete", umm, yikes)

Or if you don't want to take the nuclear approach for all sites that you might visit: simply delete any cookie matching 'washingtonpost*' or 'wapo*' (the latter is their annoying social reader Facebook thingy) and it's like you were never there. Methods vary by browser type. They certainly aren't tracking by source IP.

I'd forgotten about this thread. For anybody who has not been to Union Market lately, the DC Mobile Sharpening stand has added a pretty staggering array of knives for sale. It's easily the most impressive selection I've seen in the city. A lot of high-end custom work (think Murray Carter, etc., $$$$), but also some entry level traditional Japanese blades around the $100 mark; I forgot to note the brands,but they all appeared forged. If you shell out for one of the real beauties they will throw in lifetime sharpening for free

And Bloomingdale on Sundays. I sampled several of their offerings this week and last, and overall they are far and above Oh, Pickles! as mentioned above. With the pricing they would only be an occasional splurge (I took home a teeny, tiny container of the kimchee cukes: $5!). North Mountain Pastures had some really interesting riffs on kimchee last year. I'm hoping that when more varieties of summer produce comes in season they will do that again.

RIP Buster's Seafood at the Dupont Market. I used to get one almost every week when he had them live in season and pan fry it up at home for a treat.

It doesn't have to be you. Somebody out there in society is coming to that conclusion because they perceive it as acceptable, precisely because of the subtle and not-so-subtle cues that cyclists are somehow unworthy as road users and a universal danger to everybody else. Does that clear it up? It's about changing the attitude that somehow you "know that he is going to blow right through the stop sign without slowing down" based solely on "the way these cyclists are around pedestrians". When in a vast majority of the cases that is not the outcome.

Should it seem weird to essentially airlift a regional seafood restaurant and plop it down on another coast with it's own regional seafood culture? I know we live in a world where any cuisine is basically a FedEx cargo hold ride away (sushi grade tuna that goes from East Coast fishing grounds to Tsukiji Market back to the East Coast rings a bell), but this struck me funny. It shouldn't anymore, but it does in this case. I got the same feeling about Joe's Stone Crab. I don't get me wrong, I'm excited to have both as options in town.

But you see that by making generalizations you are, right? And that this re-enforces or normalizes attitudes that put law-abiding cyclists in danger, right? It's fine to point out that some bikers are dangerous road users because they absolutely are, but the default seems to lump every biker into the same bucket: guilty until proven sufficiently subservient to cars.. Statements like the ones quoted above make some people think sh*t like this is "OK", because, ya know, scofflaw cyclists! For some reason we would not find it acceptable to swung a baseball bat at somebody for walking too slowly in front of you on a narrow sidewalk, but it's cool to aim a multi-ton vehicle at an unarmored person if they get in your way. Again: think about how f*cked up that is.

That's kind of point: we've normalized dangerous behavior by cars, even when the rate of incidents (close calls and actual collisions) is much closer to that of cyclists than we would like to believe based on oft-quoted personal anecdotes. How many pedestrian injuries are due to cyclists vs. cars? Even normalizing for miles driven/ridden it's not even close. In my personal kingdom there would be two basic requirements for citizenship that everybody would have to complete that would make our society the most polite one in the world: 1) Everybody would need to spend at least a year working in the service industry (counter clerk, checkout person, waiter, bus driver, whatever) to gain appreciation for how the "other side" makes a living 2) Everybody would need to spend a cumulative week each year using each of the following for at least a significant percentage of their commute (where possible): driving, public transportation, biking, walking

I should know better than to stir up a hornet's nest, but I'm always amazed at this view that cyclists are the out-of-control dangers of the road. The truth is that people notice the small percentage of adrenaline junkie, bat-out-of-hell cyclists because, well, the human brain is wired to identify them. The bikers who (mostly) follow the rules blend in (thought experiment: you probably could not for the life of you recall the make and model or even color of a car you followed for a majority of a normal commute on any given day last week, but if some a**hole driver cut you off or did something dangerously out of the ordinary you could probably recall lots of details about them or their car). More to the point, sometimes bikers bend or break the rules because it's what gets us home to our families alive. If I do an Idaho stop (treat a red light as a 2-way stop, proceed when crossing traffic is clear) it's safer for me because now I am ahead of traffic until the next intersection and visible to any driver who is approaching and no longer in danger of the dreaded "right hook". I'm fully aware that it's against DC regulations, but my experience with traffic downtown tells me unequivocally that it reduces the chance of getting flattened when the light turns green. Furthermore, there are drivers out there who are actively trying to hurt us. And I'm not talking about people not paying attention to the road or engrossed in their phones, I mean people who actively force emergency evasion simply because they don't like the fact that we are on the road at all and they perceive we are costing them 30 seconds or so of their commute (which we aren't). Think about how f*cked up that is for a minute. So, please spare us the righteous indignation of the sainted car driver beset on all sides by the barbarian pedal pushers.

I'm kind of amazed at the lack of discussion about Red Hen, but selfishly I like it that way . It's nice that they are setting aside so many spots for drop-ins to keep it neighbor-friendly, and given the business I doubt there will be any pressure to change that. We've not had a sit down experience here yet, all of our visits have been for a drink and a quick bite at the bar (which honestly may be what Red Hen excels at). I do recall a couple of cocktails at $11 or $12 on a recent visit, but it sounds like the list changes frequently. They certainly *average* well under $10. As a friend said last week, first we marveled when scores cabs were coming in to drop people off at Rhode Island and 1st on a weeknight (for Boundary Stone), and now we have Ubers blocking the street and valet parking (!!!) around the corner.

This is the place I was first introduced to okonomiyaki (we were led there by a guide on a personal walking tour, no way in hell would we have found it on our own). Maybe this explains why I've been disappointed with pretty much every other attempt at it!