Long ago, far away, the book Fantastic Dives by Elliott Koretz and Michael Nankin was my roadmap to much great quirky, hole-in-the-wall food in LA. As part of writing a review of The Pantry, I found this video by the authors, who look to have had a segment on KNXT back when.
Category Archives: Food & Drink
Tyrolean Inn and Cottages
From a review I just posted on Yelp:
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When you’re a couple for a long time, there are certain stories you tell again and again. There are aspects of each other you always tell people about. This is one she tells about me.
It was Christmas, 1987. I had just started a relationship with a woman whose folks lived in San Jose, while we both lived in LA. She’d gone up to celebrate Christmas with her folks and I, in a buzzy fit of romanticism, followed.
On Christmas Day, we decided to take the drive along Route 9 from Campbell to Santa Cruz. Sure, it was the “long” way, but it’s a cute drive, running through the forest. We talked endlessly in the car, and she pointed out places she’d been to with her parents.
It gets to be dinner time, and she says, “I think I’m getting hungry.” And I say, “Hang on, I think I just saw a place.” I pull a U-turn, and go up the driveway to what was then the Tyrolean Inn & Cottages. Whereupon we find, there among the trees, that the main house was serving a Christmas dinner, which included duck à l’orange and venison.
On Christmas Day.
In the middle of the forest.
We’ve been together 25 years now — married for 21 of them — and have spent a lot of time as a couple finding unexpectedly good food in hidden places throughout the US and Europe.
But that was the first time, and it set the pattern.
“Hang on, I think I just saw a place.”
From Browner’s “The Duchess Who Wouldn’t Sit Down.”
What is hospitality? That would seem to be a simple question with an equally simple answer. Some four thousand years ago, an Akkadian father offered his son the following guidelines for hospitality: “Give food to eat, beer to drink, grant what is requested, provide for and treat with honor.” If anyone has ever written a better or more concise summary of the host’s duty, I have not read it.
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The philosophy of Epicurus is not about achieving happiness through self-indulgence, as many imagine; it is about recognizing that almost all the pain and fear of our lives are based on seeking that which is not good for us. Happiness comes neither by gratifying nor by denying our desires, but by excising them. We are all doomed to seek our own happiness; we can’t help ourselves. We are all, the cruel and gentle alike, condemned to seeking that happiness in the dark. We use our need as the blind use a walking stick, to determine the safety of every forward step. We must seek instead to know what we really want – and why we want it – and stop fooling ourselves that things are good merely because we desire them.
The Linz Café
I recently read Adam Gopnik’s The Table Comes First, which has had the odd consequence of prompting me to think a bit about what it doesn’t discuss. More about that later, but I wanted to get this quote down for a co-worker. It’s from Christopher Alexander’s The Linz Café:
“(I)n order to get each detail to work just right… it was of course necessary to work each detail out, very exactly, by trial and error, using full scale mock-ups to get size and proportion just exactly right. For example, in the case of the alcoves, I spent several hours in the office, playing with chairs, tables, and pieces of plywood, until I had the dimensions of the alcove exactly right. I knew I had it right when it felt so comfortable, that everyone in the office clustered around, sat in the simulated alcove drinking brandy, and refused to leave.”
Mostly, Gopnik writes about food and how it influences our lives. I liked the book, nay, I almost wore out my Nook’s highlighting function on the thing with passages and aphorisms that Gopnik turns out seemingly effortlessly.
But it’s more the feeling of being in Alexander’s alcove, drinking brandy and being in a group, that I was looking for. I’m calling it “conviviality,” since it’s a fine old word.
I wanted to be sure to write this now, just on the 2nd of the year, because I want to see if this can be what I write about the most during 2012. And is there a better place to start than Alexander’s mix of empiricism and optimism in Linz? I think not.
It’s the End of the World as We Know It
The press release says it all:
“CHICAGO (March 28, 2011) – Chicago-based Goose Island, one of the nation’s most‑respected and fastest-growing small brewers with sales concentrated throughout the Midwest, today announced it had agreed to be acquired by Anheuser‑Busch, its current distribution partner, in a move that will bring additional capital into Goose Island’s operations to meet growing consumer demand for its brands and deepen its Chicago and Midwest distribution.”
{emphases added}
Damn.
Best tweet of the SotU
Is here, by @howardggoldberg:
“Obama’s reference to smoked salmon was a subtle appeal for the liberal Jewish vote in ’12. As Yale lawyers know, he meant Lox et Veritas.”
How much did I like that? Check this journal’s title, folks.
Tastes like chicken
The New York Times has a great piece up about the tradeoffs behind that humble edible, the chicken nugget. Also, the way Amurrican kids seem to love ‘em. Great, laugh-out-loud line (although the whole thing is good):
“The house policy on the nugget is something like the policy on potty jokes: don’t laugh, but don’t let them see you flinch, either.”
What I bought today
Picked up today at 99 Bottles, my relatively local high-end beer shop in Federal Way:
* Fat Scotch Ale, by Silver City Brewery, Silverdale, WA
* Scotch Ale, by Boundary Bay Brewing, Bellingham, WA
* Demolition, by Goose Island Beer, Chicago, IL
* Bourbon County Stout, 2010 release, by Goose Island Beer, Chicago, IL
* Deliverance, by The Lost Abbey, Port Brewing, San Marcos, CA (so new, it doesn’t have a page of its own, hence the link to the brewery’s home page)
Killer App
So, while we’re on the subject of Palm…
A few weeks ago, I bought an unlocked Treo 680 from eBay. I just love the thing. I’ve been a Palm user since the Palm III, and my long-running unit was a Palm Vx. The Treo is such a jump from the Vx that I’m pleased as an alliterative cliché.
At Potlatch, I was talking to davidlevine (he has a 700p), and we both agreed Google Maps for Palm is a killer app.
Well, I think I have an improvement on that: Directory Assistant. What DA does is, it automates lookups against a phone directory web site, YP.com. Why is that particularly cool? Here’s an example:
I was with the guys from work, at a Thai restaurant up the street from us, Phuket on Queen Anne. Jasper, a co-worker, said he liked Phuket OK, but it’s nowhere near as good as this place he knows in Bellevue. “Oh?” sez I, “What place would that be?” …as I get out my Treo. “Chanta-{mumble},” is what I heard.
That was enough.
I put “chanta” and Bellevue, WA into DA, and out pops CHANTANEE FAMILY THAI RESTAURANT, on 105th. Having fetched the entry from YP.com, DA then gives you a Copy button, which allows a number of options — not just copy to the clipboard, but copy to a new Contact in your Treo’s database. Which I did. It then has a Map button which can be set to either Mapquest or, you guessed it, Google Maps.
Did I mention it’s freeware? Or that it does reverse lookups (that is, you give it a phone number, and it replies with a party)? Or that it handles residential listings as easily as business?
If you have a Treo, you never have to make expensive 411 calls to your carrier again. Highly recommended.
