Category: Food and Drink
San Francisco substitution the rent is too damn high
Restaurateurs who say they can no longer find or afford servers are figuring out how to do without them. And so in this city of staggering wealth, you can eat like a gourmand, with real stemware and ceramic plates. But first you’ll have to go get your own silverware.
…Restaurateurs here have taken a model familiar to taquerias and fast-casual, cafeteria-style places like Sweetgreen and Chipotle Mexican Grill, and pushed it further up the fine-dining food chain. Call it fast-fine, they suggest, or fine-casual. Or counter service “in a full service environment” that includes $11 cocktails and $22 pan-roasted salmon.
By the way, rent is not the only problem:
On July 1, the minimum wage in San Francisco will hit $15 an hour, following incremental raises from $10.74 in 2014. The city also requires employers with at least 20 workers to pay health care costs beyond the mandates of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to paid sick leave and parental leave.
Even the dosa is troubled:
In December, he opened a counter-service version of Dosa in Oakland. The new restaurant serves cardamom- and fenugreek-spiced cocktails. But there’s also a self-service water station, and a busing station for diners inclined to clear their own tables. (If they aren’t, an employee will do the job.)
Here is more from Emily Badger (NYT). Addendum: Hadur in the comments writes: “Who could have predicted that this would happen in America’s most high-tech city?”
The slippery slope
Members of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ family were followed by the owner of the restaurant they were kicked out of over the weekend after they settled an alternative place to dine.
During an interview Monday on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s radio show, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the father of the press secretary, said Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., tailed Sanders’ in-laws across the street and along with a number of other people protested their presence at the restaurant to which they had migrated.
Sanders and her husband were said to not be present at the second restaurant.
Here is more. I still believe in freedom of association in matters such as this, but I also think you should, as a personal decision, serve Republicans at the lunch counter. This is what starts to happen when you don’t.. Civility remains underrated, and is this a good time to apply just a little behavioral economics to how the interactions might escalate.
Via Megan.
We will never disapprove of current levels of animal cruelty
Not fundamentally, no. However terrible our current treatment of animals may be, most of us don’t seem to mind very much, and I suppose that is consistent with what a Darwinian theory would predict. Here are a few facts about the sociologically specific nature of vegetarianism:
They tend to be liberal-leftist politically: in USA, we have a 52% of liberals versus a 14% of conservatives and a 34% of self-styled “neutral” [27];
They display an inclination to secular/atheist views on religion matters (e.g., Humane Research Council [27], where it is shown that about half of the American community of vegans/vegetarians is not religious—a percentage that is considerably higher than that of the general population).
Less predictable may be the fact that a rather high percentage of vegans/vegetarians revert to carnism after a certain amount of time (in US, according to Humane Research Council [27], 2% of the respondents were vegans/vegetarians, while no less than 10% were former vegans/vegetarians)…
Not by chance, of the mentioned 10%, one third dropped the lifestyle after 3 months or less, one half within a year, and therefore only less than 20% “resisted” for more than a year.
That is from a recent article
Artificial meat? Yes, yes I know. But we already have cauliflower, and drenched in yogurt sauce and green cardamom pods and garam masala that is quite delicious, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter. Vegetarian food in India already tastes better than most meat dishes consumed in the United States.
Hat tip goes to Rolf Degen.
How much is deep sea fishing subsidized?
While the ecological impacts of fishing the waters beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas”) have been widely studied, the economic rationale is more difficult to ascertain because of scarce data on the costs and revenues of the fleets that fish there. Newly compiled satellite data and machine learning now allow us to track individual fishing vessels on the high seas in near real time. These technological advances help us quantify high-seas fishing effort, costs, and benefits, and assess whether, where, and when high-seas fishing makes economic sense. We characterize the global high-seas fishing fleet and report the economic benefits of fishing the high seas globally, nationally, and at the scale of individual fleets. Our results suggest that fishing at the current scale is enabled by large government subsidies, without which as much as 54% of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at current fishing rates. The patterns of fishing profitability vary widely between countries, types of fishing, and distance to port. Deep-sea bottom trawling often produces net economic benefits only thanks to subsidies, and much fishing by the world’s largest fishing fleets would largely be unprofitable without subsidies and low labor costs. These results support recent calls for subsidy and fishery management reforms on the high seas.
Emphasis added, that is by Enric Sala, et.al., via Anecdotal.
Alesund notes
Alesund, Norway is one of the most beautiful small cities in Europe. The setting is picture-perfect, and much of the architecture was redone in 1904-1905 in Art Nouveau style, due to a fire that burned down the previous wooden structures. The Art Nouveau murals in the town church deserve to be better known.
This time around, Norway seems vaguely affordable. The food is “good enough,” especially if you like cod. Dark chocolate ice cream is hard to come by. Driving to the puffins takes 3-4 hours, though they are not always to be seen.
Vanilla is worth more than silver
The price of vanilla has hit a record high of $600 (£445) per kilogram for the second time since 2017 when a cyclone damaged many of the plantations in Madagascar, where three quarters of the world’s vanilla is grown. Silver by comparison currently costs $538/kg.
Demand for vanilla has kept the prices high, leading some ice cream manufacturers to cut back and even halt production of the flavour, sparking fears of shortages over the summer.
Here is the full story, and note this:
Replacement printer ink cartridges can cost between $8 and $27, depending on the type of printer you have. A single black ink jet cartridge from one major manufacturer can cost $23 for just 4ml of ink – enough to print around 200 pages.
Manufacturers argue they need to charge this to cover the loss they are selling the printer hardware at, together with the research and development they do on ink technology. But cut open an ink cartridge and you will see that most of the space inside is taken up with sponge, designed to help preserve and deliver the ink.
And when you are paying what works out to be around $1,733/kg of ink, you might be better off printing with pure silver instead.
Is there a Chinese salamander bubble?
Bizarrely, only 3 percent of the animals raised by the farms are eventually sold to restaurants. The rest are sold to more start-up farms. This absurd amphibian Ponzi scheme so inflated the worth of the salamanders that a small, 2-kilogram individual could sell for around $1,500. As a result, people began supplementing the farmed stock by illegally collecting the animals from the wild. “The high prices created a sort of salamander rush,” says Jing Che from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, who was involved in the recent study.
That is from Ed Yong, via Brian Slesinsky.
A microeconomic guide to travel, including Ethiopia
That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opener:
I sometimes wish the market supplied “travel guides as if microeconomics really mattered.” Most guides outline the major sights and the best hotels, but what about the little things that make up so much of the value of a trip? Here’s my handy introduction to the micro side of travel, based on my recent 10-day stay in Ethiopia. You should consider investigating these same factors before choosing a destination:
How are the sidewalks?
I enjoy walking around cities, but it’s not just the quality of the architecture or the vitality of the street life that matter. The quality of the sidewalks is a central consideration, especially in emerging economies. What good are the sights if you are looking down all the time to avoid a slip or a broken ankle because of gaping holes? Sometimes major thoroughfares have no sidewalks at all.
I am happy to report that in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, the quality of the sidewalks and street paths is high enough to sustain productive walking with your head held high. Most of the time. B, and B+ outside the capital.
There is much more at the link, definitely recommended.
The Chinese tourist hot water revolution
Bearing backpacks loaded with thermoses, sipping their steaming-hot refreshments with satisfaction, Chinese tourists’ unquenchable thirst for hot water, though odd for many Westerners, is having a huge impact on destinations worldwide, causing a “hot water revolution” in the global tourism industry.
In snow-crested Scandinavia, where chugging ice water is a long-standing habit, several hot water dispensers are being installed in Helsinki Airport to cater to Chinese travelers’ thirst for the throat-scalding beverage.
“We have long traditions in providing services for Chinese, but we want to develop them even further in order to welcome new passengers and make the current ones even happier,” Katja Siberg, SVP Marketing and Communications at Finavia, told People’s Daily Online, who added that the idea of serving hot water was proposed by her Finnish colleagues after they visited airports in China.
Helsinki Airport is not the only transportation hub that attempts to capture the hearts of Chinese tourists by providing them with hot water, and some of its counterparts have pushed the “hot water revolution” even further. In March, an intelligent hot water installation was set up in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, where USB heating vacuum cups designed by KLM were distributed to Chinese tourists as Spring Festival gifts.
Here is the full story.
Ethiopian food in Ethiopia
I will compare to Ethiopian food in the United States, so I won’t be starting from scratch here.
The good news is that the product is tastier in Ethiopia. But the other good news is that the U.S. version of the cuisine is fairly similar, and it really does give you a pretty good idea of at least mainstream restaurant cuisine in Addis Ababa.
Ethiopians really do eat a lot of injera, made out of teff. Firfir dishes, which use injera soaked in spices, are far more common in Ethiopian cuisine in Ethiopia than in the U.S. equivalent. Overall, the quality, subtlety, and diversity of injera is higher in Ethiopia, as you might expect.
Bozena Shiro is another staple, present in both countries but again far more common in Ethiopia.
Doro Wat — chicken in the red sauce — is the dish that improves the most in Ethiopia. The sauce is richer and more subtle, more in the direction of a Mexican mole than just a mere curry.
I had two meals in private homes, one in a well-to-do apartment in Addis, the other in a rural village. Neither overturned the basic impressions I have been receiving from the restaurant food.
I ate kitfo [raw beef] once and did not get sick or even feel queasy.
The fresh honey is much better in Ethiopia than what you might get in a restaurant in America. And they pop fresh popcorn rather frequently.
Especially outside of Addis Ababa, prices are very cheap. I stayed in the nicest hotel at the number one tourist site, namely Lalibela, with its underground, rock-hewn churches. A single course at breakfast cost about a dollar and was enough for a meal. Presumably some other prices are cheaper yet.
This is a wonderful country for vegetarians and vegans. I am told that for the Christian religiously observant, about one-third of all days specify an abstention from meat. So virtually all restaurants have a wide selection of vegetarian food and it is no worse than the meat dishes, perhaps better on average.
As for foreign cuisines, I had the best outcome with Indian food, perhaps because many of the spices and cooking techniques are similar. There are Sudanese and Yemeni restaurants in Addis, Italian food is plentiful (it’s not always exactly Italian, but Castelli’s is amazing), and the Chinese meal I had was decent but not sufficiently Chinese.
My Conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Interesting throughout, so interesting I don’t feel the need to give you an excerpt, here is the audio and transcript. There is no other conversation with Taleb which places his ideas in the proper context, as far as I am aware. At the end of the conversation, just keep on scrolling, Taleb starts up with Bryan Caplan for an hour, mostly on education. Here is the link for the Caplan segment only.
Pittsburgh bleg
A loyal reader writes to me:
Maybe a bleg on MR at some point (not naming me) for good places to eat and things to do in Pittsburgh?
The suburbs stretching out to eastern Ohio would count too…and is there a Tyler Cowen of Pittsburgh when it comes to ethnic dining?
I thank you all in advance for your wise and mature counsel.
Why are Americans so loud?
From Julia Belluz at Vox:
…Americans are loud
A final point about why restaurants are so loud. This has nothing to do with restaurateurs or designers or acoustic engineers. It has to do with Americans — who I believe are a slightly louder people, on average.
As a Canadian working in the US, I am often struck by how much louder my fellow diners in restaurants seem to be, and how much more loudly the people I’m walking near on streets speak to one another or into their cellphones.
This is not a scientific observation, but it’s one that’s fueled Reddit discussions and even a ban on “loud Americans” in a pub in Ireland. Sietsema, for one, also agreed with my view. “When Europeans imitate Americans, they shout,” he said. “We tend to be louder people — we’re louder talkers; we’re bigger with our expressions.”
And Alex W. asks me: Since you’re so well traveled, is this true, and if so, why? I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. At least originally, Americans had much more space than did Europeans, and this is still true to some degree. That induce norms of loudness, which have to some extent persisted.
2. America is a nation of immigrants, with English-language proficiency of varying quality, including historically. For whatever reason, good or bad, we tend to shout a bit when the listener is not fluent in our language.
3. Taleb has suggested that higher status people shout less, talk in more hushed tones, and are more likely to whisper, to grab the attention of the crowd. Perhaps America has fewer high status people to set social norms. Or perhaps our high status people derive status from their wealth, and feel the need to emit fewer cultural signals, just as wealthy Americans often dress more poorly or eat a worse diet than European elites.
4. Characters on TV speak more loudly, and Americans watch more TV and admire and mimic it more.
5. Americans command a broader personal space, keeping a greater distance, and thus they have to speak more loudly to each other (and they feel Italians are intrusive with respect to how close they stand).
6. Loudness is perhaps a byproduct of individualism.
7. American culture values “forthrightness and self-confidence.” Plus maybe it’s a regional thing?
What else?
What is Skim Milk? The FDA versus Dairy Farmers
FDA food regulation isn’t as high stakes as FDA drug regulation but it can be both costly and absurd. A case in point. The FDA controls how foods are labeled with the goal of ensuring that they are “properly” labelled. It’s important that consumers not be misled but what does one say, for example, about soy milk? Is that label proper? (The FDA so far has declined to rule on that issue but the “Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, Milk, and Cheese To Promote Regular Intake of Dairy
(DAIRY PRIDE) act may force their hand.)
Everyday Act
The FDA’s control over labeling is more powerful than it appears because it can be used to define what a product is. The FDA, for example, can’t force milk producers to add vitamins to milk but by defining milk as including certain vitamins they can say that milk without these vitamins is mislabeled! This is exactly the case with dairy farmer Randy Sowers and South Mountain Creamery. South Mountain Creamery sells skim milk, i.e. milk with the fat skimmed off. The FDA, however, wants skim milk to contain as many vitamins as whole milk so they define skim milk as including vitamin A and D. If farmers want to sell skim milk and call it “skim milk” they have to add vitamins. To avoid prosecution the FDA is requiring South Mountain Creamery to label their skim milk, “imitation skim milk”! Yes. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Real Skim Milk is Imitation Skim Milk. Sowers and the Institute for Justice are suing on First Amendment Grounds.
The FDA has a history of losing First Amendment cases and will probably lose this case as well. A Federal appeals court in Florida has already ruled in a very similar case that labeling skim milk, “skim milk” is not deceptive.
Mexico City travel tips
I’m a loyal MR reader and follower of your work. I’m so grateful for your work and your generous spirit. I’m sure you get inundated with email and other correspondence but I’m adding to the pile by requesting that someday you’ll post advice for a Oaxaca or Mexico City visit. I assure you that it would be carefully studied and utilized.
Happy Easter!
Here are my tips for Mexico City, taken from an email I sent to a friend a while ago, note I start with food but do not end there:
“1. Your number one task is to find a seller of tlacoyos in the street. This is likely a solo woman with a stand, on a corner. They are all over Mexico City, though whether in Condesa I am not sure. The vegetarian offerings are no worse, also, with beans and blue corn tortilla and cheese. Get these, and they are in general quite sanitary. You simply need to ask around, they will not be in highly visible places. I think about them often.
2. Ask for “tacqueria” rather than tacos, the latter might lead you into a restaurant.
2b. Most food in Condesa will be fine but underwhelming, think Clarendon. Try to find street food there.
3. The street food is the best food there and it is safer to eat than the restaurant food (though the latter is usually safe too).
4. Try a sandwich once or twice, just ask around, no need for a fancy place, these usually close by mid-afternoon. My favorite sandwich is the Hawaii, though I believe that is a purely subjective judgment, I do not think it is the best per se. The whole bakery culture there is quite interesting and often neglected by food people but it is important.
5. When you take a taxi out to the pyramids, there is excellent food along the way, in the middle of nowhere, have the driver stop and bring you somewhere. The pyramids are one of the best sights in this hemisphere, by the way, better than those in Egypt I think. There are also smaller pyramid sites on the way to the big pyramid site, worth visiting and also near some superb food.
6. Favorite fancy place there is Astrid and Gaston, not cheap but it won’t bankrupt you either. Peruvian/Mexican fusion, nice to sit in too.
7. If you need a break from Mexican food, the Polish restaurants there are quite good, that would be my back up choice. Of Asian food the Japanese offerings might be the best. French and German can be quite good there, though not original. Avoid “American.” Other Latin cuisines will in general be quite good there, including the steakhouses.
8. Go to Coyoacan (a suburb, sort of, but not far) and see the Frida Kahlo museum. The food stalls (“comedores”) there are not only excellent, but they look the most sanitary and mainstream of just about any in Mexico. Even your aunt could be tempted to eat there. A good stop, try a whole bunch of things for $1.50 a piece, you could spend two hours there eating and not get bored and get to sample a lot of the main dishes. Also a fun hangout.
9. When we flew into the airport, we immediately asked the taxi driver to bring us somewhere superb for a snack. Of course there was somewhere within five minutes, right nearby. Do this if you can open a line of communications.
9b. Walking is often the wrong way to find great food there, unless you are walking and asking. Walking and looking doesn’t work so well, because you are on the wrong streets if you are walking to just be walking around. Vehicles are the key, or asking and then walking to follow the advice, not to follow your walking instincts.
10. Chiles en Nogada is a seasonal dish, superb, I am not sure if they will still have it but ask around and get it if you can. It is delicious and a real treat, not to be forgotten.
11. Treat breakfast as a chance at some street food, don’t fill up on a traditional breakfast, least of all a touristy Mexican one. It will always be OK, but rarely interesting, even if it sounds somewhat authentic. Get a tlacoyo or something in the street. Any food represented by an Aztec word will be excellent, pretty much as a rule.
The non-food tips I will send separately. But the food is all about improvising, not about finding good restaurants. Most of the mid-tier restaurants are decent but for me ultimately a bit disappointing. Either go fancy or go street. Don’t trust any of the guidebook recommendations for mid-tier places, they will never be bad but mostly disappoint compared to the best stuff there.
Non-food
The Anthropology Museum is a must.
My personal favorite museum is Museo del Arte Popular, the popular art museum downtown, but I consider that an idiosyncratic preference.
Visit the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the murals there, and across the street House of Blue Tiles, get a juice there and see their murals too. Then walk from there down to the Zocalo on the main street, there is the number one walk in Mexico for a basic introduction to downtown. In fact that is the first thing I would do to get an overview of downtown and the older part of the city, even though that is not where you will end up hanging out.
The mural sites are in general excellent, I believe the best one is called Ildefonso.
I often find male clothes shopping there to be highly profitable, good mix of selection and prices. Polanco is the part of town you would go to for that, right near Pujol and also Astrid and Gaston, in fact.
Hotel Camino Real is a classic site, you can get a drink there at night with the funny colored lights. The movie Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was shot there in part, a great film. The Mexico City movie is Amores Perros, a knockout. Y Tu Mama Tambien is another, you probably know these already. I also like the old Mexican movies of Luis Bunuel, made while he lived there for a while.
The classic Mexico novel is Roberto Bolano, *The Savage Detectives*, a great read and one of the best novels of the latter part of the 20th century, the English translation is first-rate too, as good as the Spanish in my view.
I don’t like much of the music, but perhaps that is the point. Control Machete, a Mexican rap group, works pretty good as soundtrack while you are being driven around the city.
The Alan Riding book, while now badly out of date, is still an excellent overview of the older Mexico, great for background, Distant Neighbors it is called.
Have a cabbie drive you around different neighborhoods, to see rich homes, poorer sections, particular buildings. Mexico City is first-rate for contemporary architecture although most of it is quite scattered, no single place for walking around it that I know of.
Art galleries there are good for browsing, often in or near Polanco, the wealthy part of town.
Insurgentes is a good avenue for cruising.
Avoid Zona Rosa altogether at all costs, bad stuff, lots of pickpockets, no redeeming virtues whatsoever, do not be tempted.”