Michael Landrum
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Everything posted by Michael Landrum
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Since so often restaurant professionals are here to give you all advice on our world, and since so many of us, me most obviously first, have no clue as to things in the real world, I was wondering if any of you could help me with a seemingly insurmountable problem I am dealing with now in return. I am currently cat-sitting a perfectly charming feline who, when not bringing me various bird and rodent remains in tribute, seems to think that relentlessly putting his butt in my face is his life's mission. Does anyone know a way, without hurting his feelings or making him suck the life force out of me while I sleep, to make him stop? Can anyone at least tell me just to ease my mind--as I lay dying and gasping for breath--whether, in his mind, this is a good thing? Do I need to mention I am desperate for an answer?
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Well, that does it for me. I say good riddance at long last. I am just glad that Cedric has finally been exposed for the fraud he is, all this time pretending to work from morning to night but really doing absolutely nothing for me. Now that it is out in the open let's all wish him ill and hope that he heads straight to hell where he belongs. Let's see how he likes the menu there.
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Fabio Trabocchi in New York City
Michael Landrum replied to Capital Icebox's topic in News and Media
In an argument your facts would certainly be winsome, and I would admit defeat, but quoting the gustatorily esteemed docsconz : "The texture of the rice was perfectly toothsome, but the dish was simply too rich and decadent." -
Fabio Trabocchi in New York City
Michael Landrum replied to Capital Icebox's topic in News and Media
Wow. I have never wanted to eat at a restaurant more than after reading this review, but... Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh...Toothsome does NOT mean "firm but yielding to the bite"!!!!!! (Although a toothsome lass will most often be so...). Stop this malasesquipedaliapropism. Stop it now! -
Please, dear god, for the sake of all that is decent and good and human, please let this be about food somehow...
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So...what did you end up having for your entree?
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Ray's: The Steaks and Ray's: The Classics will be open normal dinner hours Thursday and Saturday, but closed Friday. Ray's Hell-Burger will be open on Thursday from 11AM to at least 6, later if people are still coming in, but no later than 8, closed Friday, and open normal Saturday hours, 11-11. No one seemed to notice, but we have been serving beer since the snowstorm, and will begin serving wine on Monday. Happy Holidays.
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Well...I could tell you about the time I *was* court-martialed...for shooting a wild boar (every bullet had to be counted and accounted for) while out on a "mid-night mission" with our Druze trackers in Syria (the Druze do eat pork) who misguidedly loved me and so took me along with them at night for coffee, stories and adventures--they didn't trust or really like "the Jews" but they thought, strangely enough, that I was related to Michael Jackson and so took me into their secretive fold thinking that I could somehow arrange them citizenship and blonde women...but that's another story. By the way, that was some damn tasty pork.
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Arlington County Meals Tax Delinquencies
Michael Landrum replied to Dark Wing's topic in News and Media
I'm no "mathemagician", but that sounds like $4 Million Dollars in revenue to me. -
After this last post, it may surprise no one to learn that while in the army, if I may share, I avoided a severe court-martial for being discovered, while on guard duty, being "tended to" (pants-at-ankles, but flag at full staff) by the base nurse--and boy was she ever base--by the base commander conducting a surprise inspection by explaining--straight-faced--that I thought my orders to "stand my post" (la'amod a'mudi) were orders to "make my post stand" (l'ha'amid amudi). After he, a commander in the 73 war, stopped laughing, picked himself off the ground, and regained his composure fifteen minutes later, he realized that no court could ever hear my case and maintain any sense of dignity or decorum and that he would look twice as bad as me, he let me off with three months of personally administered brutal, extraordinary punishments and weekly blood donations instead. (The nurse also got off unscathed (at least from that incident), in case anyone's worried, although I did wreck her dad's Citroen six month's later while on leave from Lebanon). TMI?
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If I could figure out how to use this damn editor function, I would add, perhaps unnecessarily, that the "ambush" (ma'arav) is what occurs to the digestive system later in the evening (erev) if the "Me'urav" is made from "crow" (arev), especially if one is of Western descent or origin (Maravi).
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Arlington County Meals Tax Delinquencies
Michael Landrum replied to Dark Wing's topic in News and Media
When Ray's: The Steaks was in its fourth month of operation back in 2002 I couldn't make the payment on the meals tax due for the third month's revenue, which was due, I believe, on a Thursday and was in the amount of something like seven hundred dollars or so (I was doing about $3500 a week back then). Immediately upon the following Monday morning, a uniformed and enbadgened (be-badged?) tax enforcement officer showed up to explain that the meals tax collected was funds that belonged to the County and that to fail to deliver those funds was theft both from the County which was due those funds and from the customers from whom I fraudently took that money (if I did not deliver it to the County in whose name I took it from my customers)--sort of a triple-theft slash fraud scenario. How anyone got away with the kind of numbers reported, after the enforcement I experienced, is beyond me. -
Jerusalem Mixed Grill (Me'urav Yerushalmi), at least in Jerusalem, consists of chicken liver, heart, gizzards and, if your lucky, some thigh maybe. The best purveyors tend to be of Iraqi descent and serve it "laafa" style (rolled up--laafa is colloquial Arabic for rolled or wrapped--in an extra large, thin pita)--definitely the way to go. The root for laafa is a cognate of the same in Hebrew, which in Hebrew slang has definite sexual connotations--adding an extra measure of lustiness to this hearty and cheap street food indulgence. Even better, the word "Me'urav" puns irresistably with both "ambush" and "crow" which is always a suspected source of product from less reputable vendors adding an extra frisson of danger to the whole affair.
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How about I substitute the word "infantile" with "solipstic" and apologize to anyone's work which I may have insulted unduly? I should also note, in apology, that in regards to some of the trends I may have criticized above, there is a GREAT difference between being the innovator (or being a chef whose entire body of work embraces that philosophy or technical approach) and being a follower who merely turns the exciting breakthroughs of another chef into just another tired, trite, over-hyped trend. And, really, and this is the point I was making, is "catering to your every whim and desire while indulging all of your senses in the utmost of luxury and spoiling you with the rarest and most decadent of tastes and costliest of ingredients" any better or more adult than going to some place for an over-priced bowl of cereal when you don't feel like cooking but do feel like meeting friends out?
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Hmmm...an asparagus spear in a test tube; truffled pop corn,; foie gras ice cream,; cotton candy (or other carnival-based food) anything; "watch me eat a worm" organ dishes; unsafe, amateur, Brady Bunch-style "Hey, let's make some charcuterie and we can save the prom!" playing with sausages in the basement; all that erector set and surgical tweezer plating with micro this and mini that; a mushroom gelee shaped in a mushroom-shaped mold so it will look like a "mushroom" on the plate (kinda like Beavis and Butthead's butt-shaped tatoo of a tatooed butt that they wanted to get tatooed on their butts; Mr. Wizard Junior Chemistry Set (not recommended for children under 11) powders and foams; "adult" grilled cheese sandwich apps for $12.95... Do I really need to go on? There's still dessert lists to go into. Compared to all this, a restaurant serving cereal certainly comes off as more honest, less precious and maybe even a bit more adult. Of course, one should always keep in mind what Steve Martin went through to get a reservation at the hottest restaurant in town in LA Story. The restaurant? Pronounced "Lideo." Spelled "L'Idiot."
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I can think of any number of fine-dining trends and practices that are equally, if not more, infantile at heart and in nature but that suffer from the additional sins of being self-delusional and self-glorifying, masturbatory, disdainfully irrelevant, and with even more of a rip-off mark-up than the innocent if not entirely innocuous cereal. The other main difference being that cereal is something that people actually enjoy and don't just pretend to. Two simple things to remember which are often overlooked in the hospitality business, regardless of price or quality: 1) A restaurant, despite what the chef or owner wants it to be, is first and foremost a public, social, identity-driven gathering space; and 2) Exclusive by definition excludes and is therefore necessarily exclusionary. More and more I am finding this to be the DC theme song, so...Get out your golden calculators and lean a little bit closer...
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Mama Ayesha's recently went through a serious upgrade in both design, accommodations and service. Thankfully, they did not suffer a corresponding decrease in quality--in fact many things have improved. They are indeed Palestinian, but what Palestinians would call Lebanese, and more authentically so for it. (A Palestinian-Palestinian restaurant may very well have only hummous, fool, pickles, a fresh salad or two, and a couple of meats grilled over charcoal outside--what would be called a Lebanese restaurant would have more and more refined dishes in addition to the standards plus fish and a greater selection of mezze and salads). They have always been one of my favorite restaurants in the area for as long as I have lived here, both when run down and now. Sadly, though, they do not serve k'naafa. --- ETA [A brief note from your humble narrator - I love the fact that we have posts like this.]
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Once the FCC approves bloviating ani...
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Outside of the luxe factor, in my limited experience, I would say there is a difference between breaking new ground (then) and re-discovering craft (now). One could also argue the difference between punk rock and "body art" versus Mozart and powdered wigs...
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Listen here, sunshine, it'll be a cold day on the surface of a pulsating variable before you get a look at my Very Large Array. That's not on the menu for you. Neither is the Very Long Baseline Array. Nor will you be a part of the Very Large Array Expansion Project. Ever. Go play in your own Bok Globule.
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Cooking aside, I believe Kevin, a regular culinary Constable Dogberry, should have gone home for his misuse of the word "toothsome" in whose seeming plausibility and presumed cleverness, true to the famed Miss Malaprop, he seemed to take particular pride. Now if he were describing the ripening Padma rather than his undercooked brisket that would be another matter. From now on at restaurants, whenever offered a final course after feasting on some free-range pulchritude and several sidereal dishes, I am going to declare myself too fulsome for dessert, even for a littoral taste...Now when it comes to post-praedials, well now that's another matter, I'll drink 'til the first crepuscular lights.
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Or, better yet, a certain type of chaps will guarantee they will find you.
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Is there any doubt as to why he has risen to become our fearless leader? This post reminds me of "The Forbidden Donut" episode of The Simpsons in too many ways to even mention, most especially how enraged the devil becomes when his plan to torture Homer by making him eat donuts forever backfires. More intriguing is how this evokes, in my mind, a revised staging of Huis Clos with Don as Joseph, a pizza as Ines, Thanksgiving dinner as Estelle, and, of course, Waitman as Valet, with Don uttering his take on the famous line, "Hell is other pizzas."
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You can call me Dirty and then lift up your skirt.
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Thanks to some last minute holiday errands (if they think last year's outfit ruined the family Thanksgiving, wait 'til they see what Stigg and Franz at the Leather Rack put together for me this year!) I finally got the chance to try BGR at the new Dupont location and I have to say I was very impressed. They really do a superb job of taking the "great American burger" to the next level. The burger itself has a great first-bite "wow" effect from the char, and the complexity and depth of flavor from the high-quality dry-aged blend really comes through throughout, although I was forced to wonder if there wasn't at least a small amount of kosher beef in the blend. Onion rings greaselessly fried and better than should be allowed and the shake absolutely perfect (not some sickeningly sweet, treacly travesty). Tomato was heretically quite tasty. Pluses: Richard Butler, The Stranglers, Blur and Pearl Jam. Minuses: The Strokes, Green Day, and Oasis (eww).
