Category: Food and Drink

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.

Cocoa futures hit a
23-year high, capping a successful year for the commodity.  Chocolate
has done rather well this year, and not simply because the world has
been fretting about recession and craving comfort food. Constrained
supply coupled with robust demand has helped London cocoa futures rise
by some 71.0% since the end of last year, making cocoa one of the
market’s best performing commodities.  On Wednesday, the day before
millions of people around the world offered boxes of the sweet stuff to
their relatives as Christmas gifts, cocoa futures for May 2009 delivery
hit a 23-year high of £1,820.0($2,545.90) per ton in London(…)

Here is the story and I thank John de Palma for the pointer.  Here are previous installments in the series.

The cult-like fascination with the game has even spawned a World of Warcraft-themed restaurant in China, complete with dishes inspired by the game.

The article has other interesting features, mostly on the value of WoW experience in the job market.  Here is one bit:

…employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft
players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100%
because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not
great, etc.

Good, humorous uses of "etc." are not easy to come by.

Burger King Corp. may have just the thing. The home of the Whopper has launched a new men’s body spray called "Flame." The company describes the spray as "the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat."

The fragrance is on sale at New York City retailer Ricky’s NYC in stores and online for a limited time for $3.99.

Burger King is marketing the product through a Web site featuring a photo of its King character reclining fireside and naked but for an animal fur strategically placed to not offend.

Here is the article and I thank John de Palma for the pointer.

I have a great many things to be thankful for and will be reflecting on them today. I wish all our readers the very best.

"We just really wanted to shatter the cupcake-pizza dichotomy. It’s just existed for too long."

I am a monist myself.  Here is much more information.  It is also an example of Thomas Schelling’s idea of research by accident:

"[A] lot of our ideas come from just not having the proper materials," Wilder said. "Like the pupzzas came from not being able to find the large tins."

A method of producing synthetic diamonds using tequila – Mexico’s favourite alcoholic drink – has been discovered, scientists there say.

Not from The Onion.  I thank Michael Makowsky for the pointer.

Best to clear your mind and emotions of group loyalties and resentments
and ask, if this belief gave me no pleasure of rebelling against some
folks or identifying with others, if it was just me alone choosing,
would my best evidence suggest that this belief is true?  All else is the road to rationality ruin.

I don’t have to tell you who that is.

Currently, what are you favorite places to eat in the D.C. metro area?

I love Thai X-ing (DC), Meaza (Baileys Crossroad), Nava Thai (Wheaton), Hong Kong Palace (Falls Church), China Star (Fairfax), Bombay Indian (Silver Spring) and Angeethi (Herndon), plus just about everything Vietnamese in Eden Center (Falls Church). The 9th Street Ethiopian row is very good as well, and also Zenenbech, up on Florida/U/5th or so. Those places are very good and I can eat at them more or less without limit. There aren’t many places around as good as those.

Here is much more.

The plan is bad. But bad policies get enacted all the time. But
we’re at a point now where congress is, allegedly, in the hands of
progressive leadership. Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage
to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while
doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer
virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral
victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to
implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone’s going
to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core
libertarian.

It’d be one thing for a bunch of conservative politicians to ram a
terrible policy through. Then we could say “well, if some progressives
win the next election things will be different.” But if this comes
through an allegedly progressive congress then the whole enterprise
starts looking pretty hollow.

Here is the link.  Personally, I don’t get drunk, but there are a number of enterprises — not just Matt’s — which are looking pretty hollow these days.  And I don’t just mean banks.  You can blame lots of the crisis on government — more than most people think — but at the end of the day it is hard to escape the conclusion that markets simply have performed horribly in a number of important regards.

As one of Matt’s commentators indicates, it is time for both candidates to show up in Washington and start…um…acting like Senators.

Addendum: Via Greg Mankiw, here is a chilling analysis of the bail-out.  Get this line:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are
non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be
reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Second addendum: Also via Matt, here is a round-up of critical commentary on the Paulson plan.  Count me in too, among those screaming "no!"  Yet it seems it’s going to happen.