Category: Food and Drink

They are both about economic growth.  One is here and the story involves a sari and the Taj Mahal.

The other is here, from Taiwan ("China fact of the day"?), and the markets in everything version as well.  Excerpt:

The reasonably priced food includes curries, pasta, fried chicken and
Mongolian hot pot, as well as elaborate shaved-ice desserts with names
like "diarrhea with dried droppings" (chocolate), "bloody poop"
(strawberry) and "green dysentery" (kiwi). Despite the disturbing
descriptions, the desserts were great. But after seeing curry drip down
a mini-toilet, I may never have that sauce again.

Do read the whole thing, but the bottom line is this:

Every customer sits on a stylish acrylic toilet (lid down) designed
with images of roses, seashells or Renaissance paintings. Everyone
dines at a glass table with a sink underneath. The servers bring your
meal atop a mini toilet bowl (quite convenient, as it brings the food
closer to your mouth), you sip drinks from your own plastic urinal (a
souvenir), and soft-swirl ice cream arrives for dessert atop a dish
shaped like a squat toilet. 

I thank Chug and Kurt for the pointers.

Pork brains in milk gravy (canned).

I thank Yves Smith for the pointer.  Yves also points us to a rare cheetah captured on camera.

It is Little Seoul, mostly in Annandale, spilling over into West Alexandria.  The number of innovative Korean restaurants continues to increase and they are usually crowded.  I love the new place devoted to the many forms of Korean porridge. Seoul Gool Dae Gee Honey Pig on Columbia Pike has the best decor (and the pork neck) around.  TodamSoonDooBoo (also known as Tofu House, next to the Giant, straddling 236 and Columbia Pike) has dumpling soup and tofu.  The two branches of Shilla Bakery and Le Matin de Paris give Virginia a cafe scene.  Much of my eating out is now Korean or in the new Vietnamese places in the Western Saigon interior branch of the Eden Center; either that or Ray's Hell-Burger, Hong Kong Palace, Thai X-ing, or the now-reopened Nava Thai, right next door to the shuttered old branch. 

Annandale used to be a nice appendage to the peak places to eat.  Now it's the epicenter, the main culinary show, and also the coolest place to hang out.

Addendum: Here is a good article, which mentions Korean food as the next trend to come.  Let's hope not.

The Kaufmann Foundation brought together many bloggers and many servings of Kansas City barbecue.  (Isn't America a great country?  I met Mark Thoma for the first time and tomorrow we talk about blogging and the future of the world.)  Then we voted, using Borda Point Count.  Tim Kane tells me:

Oklahoma Joe's
wins handily.  Arthur Bryant's loses handily.  Others are close. 
(Hmmm … looks like a normal).

The article opens in this manner:

On Bondadagur, or Husband's Day, the menfolk of Iceland
are spoiled by their wives and girlfriends, who serve them with
traditional delicacies such as ram's testicles and sheep's head jelly,
a recipe for which is handily included in the latest online edition of
Iceland Review, alongside the latest bulletins on the economic meltdown.

It is interesting throughout.

I'm afraid to give this one much of a subtitle:

I thank John de Palma for the pointer.

Will Wilson blogs:

Seattle’s 5 Spot has a new “Blue Plate Special” promotion, with the daily meal priced like this:

There’s a built-in stop-loss, too. They make a limited number of blue plates each night, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Smokers are three times more likely to kick the habit for at least six months when they are paid up to $750 (£520), a new study has found.

Nearly 900 General Electric workers took part in the test across 85 US sites. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

GE will launch a similar scheme in 2010 for all US employees, believing it will be cost-effective in the long term.

Ben, a loyal MR reader, asks:

What is the preferable type of food to eat when it is produced en masse? I.e., for what type of food does the quality not diminish significantly when it's produced for a buffet? How much worse is Panda Express from "real" Chinese food vs. Fast Food Mexican from "real" Mexican?

Indian food, produced en masse, sits relatively well, especially the non-meat dishes and the ground meats.  It can sit and stew for a long time.  Chinese food, which usually should be cooked at high heat and served immediately, wares about the worst.  Barbecue can do fine, if it is cooked properly to begin with (not usually the case, however).  At Chipotle the carnitas are pretty good and they are cooked sous vide at a distance and then reheated in the restaurant.  But the top prize goes to Korean vegetable dishes, many of which are fermented and pickled in the first place.  Natasha and I catered our wedding party with Korean vegetables (and a bit more, including some cold meats) with no loss of culinary value.

You'll find it here, in html version, and it has more individual revisions than ever before.  The list of my favorite places, for instance, is about half new.  The blog version of the guide you'll find here and it offers updates on a more or less real time basis, while the html version is revised once a year or so.  The html version is useful if you want to print the whole thing out.  Here's one of the new reviews:

What is the best barbecue in Kansas City?  It was once Arthur Bryant's but is that really still the best?  I mean The Best.  Many people — not just me — will benefit from your correct answer to this question.

Choping, it seems, is a practice in Singapore when you reserve a table while you are getting your food at public eating areas.  The problem (or is it one?) arises when there are more groups of patrons than available tables.  Your little tissue marker stands on the table while other people wander around looking for a place to plant their little markers, so they may better eat their laksa.

It seems to me that choping is efficient.  If you can reserve a table by choping, the inefficiency is that you show up to eat earlier, and grab a table earlier, than you would like to.  But once you have a table you don’t have to hurry so much.  If you can’t reserve the table by choping, the inefficiency is that you go to the food stalls without lines.  (The very best food stalls can have lines of half an hour or more.)  Without choping you are less willing to wait in those lines because the good tables are going away.

Choping increases the ease of getting the very best food of Singapore.  And that food is very very good indeed.

Choping may not be efficient elsewhere. 

Addendum: Al Roth comments.