To Serve Man

Pardon Our Dust...

2011-05-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm moving to a Wordpress blog, because people who know more about blogging insist that one day, when I can actually do something with my blog aside from rankle the odd Conservative diner who stumbles upon it, I will find it more amenable and nice-looking.

People have said the same to my husband, I'm sure, but fortunately for me, he's very 1.1.

So please follow me over here at http://tablesidestories.wordpress.com
I shant be updating at blogspot any longer.

And thank you for reading, and thank you for telling me, in private, that it makes you laugh. (For some reason, few people admit publicly that they enjoy my blog. I feel rather like a British Golden Globes host...)

Cheers!
Erin

I Puked in Your Car...What's For Breakfast?

2011-01-31T14:57:00.000-08:00

When I was waiting tables at this popular breakfast & lunch spot in the OC (don't call it that), the chef/owner, who also lived on the premises, was this crazy fucker who turned up The Pogues full blast on Sunday mornings, played the drums shirtless (and not very well) in his bedroom—of which tables 9 through 13 had a perfect view—and drank shopping carts full of booze on a regular basis, often with his sweet and also-deeply-alcoholic sous chef, Bumpy.

Several times a week, his friends would come to drink all the restaurant's booze and jump off the roof and perform other feats the guys on Jackass wish that they were stupid enough to. We girls would clock in at 7am in our overalls and bandannas, and be greeted by some disheveled hobo in the kitchen, slobbering all over the espresso machine in agony. One morning, after shooing one away and making proper cappuccinos for the gang, which included nearly all of the chef's childhood buddies and our whole kitchen crew, we learned that one of the high school chums had gotten mad at some point in the night and stumbled off to sleep in the sous chef's car.

He wandered into the kitchen as the first tables of blue hairs and rich housewives filed onto the patio for breakfast, and announced to Bumpy, "I puked in your car. What's for breakfast?"

Following are some of my favorite hangover foods, by region. Bumpy-approved:

Korean:

Seoulleongtang (pronounced "So Long, Tongue"): beef bones simmered in water until it turns milky white - bland on its own, but you're supposed to add coarse sea salt, kimchi, chili paste, and whatever else they give you in the banchan dishes that come on the side. The marrow will restore you to life, and the water will hydrate you. Plus Koreans are so goddamned nice and quiet. When you're not related to them.

Vietnamese:

Pho (pronounced "fuh"): again, beef bones simmered in water, but with allspice and star anise and plenty of salt, so you get the most marrowy, baking-spicy, slightly fennelly broth you want to just fall asleep in. Add all the fresh Thai basil, greens (often mizuna), jalapeños, and sprouts you can; test the broth before mucking it up with plum sauce and Sriracha.
Order fatty brisket to further flavor the broth, but only plan to eat the eye round, ordered "on the side" so you can dunk it right before eating and not get that leathery consistency you get when it's been sitting in there too long.

Bun bo Hue (pronounced "bun bo weigh"): from the Hue region in Vietnam comes this soup with cubes of pinkish-brown floating in it. What is that, you say? Just eat it, it's good for you.
Okay, I ate it - it tastes like sausage, sort of, but there's something....tinny. Tinny like iron? Yeah, that's cause it's congealed pig blood. And it's delicious. But now you've puked on my shoes, you stupid drunk. So that's one setback to going bun bo Hue instead of pho for your hangover cure (but it's the only one).

Mexican:

Posole or Pozole: Yeah, yeah menudo. Whatever. When I'm three seconds from puking on your shoes, do you really want to show me a bowl of tripe? It looks like something a doctor left in you during surgery that you finally passed, but not before it fused with your own intestines and created a sort of hybrid tissue that longs to tickle your mouth with its freaky little fingers. Fuck menudo.

Posole is porky and dried-chile spicy and full of corny, earthy hominy. Fill it with cilantro and radishes and squirt it with lime. Don't dip tortillas in it unless you're really sure you can stand that much starch yet.

Albondigas: Means "meatballs." It's also got lots of squash, celery, carrots, potatoes, and onions in it - and whatever, really. Just use cilantro or get out. if you're one of those unfortunate people who was born with the enzyme that turns cilantro to soap in the mouth, I pity you, you poor bastard. Cilantro, for the rest of us, produces an ecstatic experience that is rivaled only by the finale of Bizet's "Carmen", combined with a meteor shower and oral sex, all at once.

Maybe you should get that fixed or something.

Chinese:

Congee: A velvet rice porridge designed to coat your insides with loving caresses, like a doting Chinese mother; not the kind that makes you hold your pee while you play Rachmaninoff to perfection. By the way, Tiger Mother? Whatever. Saw it when it was "Sybil" and it was just some crazy white lady. Which brings me to a critical analysis of white people: Chinese kids, it is widely held, flourish with this strict discipline. Whatever their emotional problems later in life, they certainly don't develop multiple personalities to deal with the trauma. Psssh. Lazy, soft white people. When I finally bless the world with my spawn, I will make them green-thumb baking wizard piano virtuosos with straight A's and a job at 15. You'll all appreciate it when your kids grow up to be whiny, lazy brats who can't commit to each other and are deeply depressed that they haven't become famous.

In other words, me. Thanks, hippie parents, for all that "emotional license."

Japanese:

Ramen: Not Top Ramen, you silly such-and-such. Get the handmade noodles and tonkotsu broth simmered all day with pork bones. Then pop a soft-boiled egg in 'er and so good make eye roll back! Add MSG. It makes you smarter. That's the "headache" you all complain about.

Eastern European/Ashkenazi Jewish:

Matzoh Ball Soup: Is there anything in the world as restorative as a broth polka-dotted with the schmaltz from a chicken's skin? It's a velvety hug from your bubbe, and its stern carrots seem to suggest a soup that's seen it all, and has learned that, at the end of the day, it comes down to roots. Root vegetables, your family roots, the roots of your faith. The farther down your roots go, the more unmovable you are when the winds come—like a potato, an onion. Also, take your elbows off of the table, you schlump.

Hit me with some more regional hangover cures.

Chefs Have Awful Taste in Wine

2011-01-13T10:59:00.001-08:00

It's true.

I've worked for a CIA-trained chef in California who drank 375's of Port like a little girl - yeah, he drank 10 at a click and would end up shooting someone in the ass with a BB gun, but still.

Your Pegasus called, little girl, it would like you to brush its glorious mane.

Another chef, a nationally acclaimed sushi savant, favored Rosenblum Zinfandel when I met him. He's since graduated, but with a slow and painstaking babystepping that he probably never, ever had to endure in his Japanese food training.

Just because you've got a preternatural sense for fish doesn't mean you're ready for Burgundy, Daniel-sahn.

The third chef...forget it. Beer. I love good beer, but this is about wine.

So when I come across shit like this:

"Chef Kent (Rathbun, of Dallas fame and Austin jeering) Recommends"

I wet myself with glee. Let's look at the flavor/texture profiles of his favorite wines, yes?

Whites:
Amayna, Chardonnay, Leyda Valley, Chile 2006
Domaine Chandon, étoile , Rosé, Sonoma-Napa County
MacMurray Ranch, Pinot Gris, Sonoma Coast
Patz and Hall, Chardonnay, Alder Springs Vineyard, Rutherford
Roederer Estate, Brut, Anderson Valley NV
Rubicon Estate, Roussanne-Viognier-Marsanne, Blancaneaux, Rutherford
St. Supéry, Sémillon-Sauvingnon [sic] Blanc, Virtú, Napa Valley

So from this, I take it this guy's bag is a giant bucket of buttered popcorn topped with oak chips and a copy of Wine Spectator with which he can wipe his glistening craw.

Not a single Old-World-style wine among them, which has become, for me, synonymous with a lighter, better balanced, often subtler experience.

If I had more time and weren't just writing this to blow off steam between tasks on my steps-to-fucking-Shangri-La-sized to-do list, I'd thoughtfully consider the notion that chefs' palates suffer from an eventual blanding - a phenom that explains why so many guests find things saltier than the chef can taste. Anyone out there know the results of studies done to this effect? Like I said, I'm busy with an actual job. Let the geeks do the work and spittle all over my shirt while they tell me about it.

His red selection is even worse. I won't go into it.

The point of this instruction today is: Don't give a fucking rat's ass what the chef likes to drink. If it were up to him, he'd be passed out in the walk-in with an empty case of cherry Robitussin and an underaged Thai hooker.

Another Yelper Makes Me Want To Shove Razors In My Eyes

2010-12-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

"My friend ordered three dishes. I don't speak Chinese, so I don't know their exact names, but I have approximated them below:

1. Chicken Buried in a Giant Mountain of Red Peppers that is Really Goddamn Hot
2. Fish Fillet Swimming in a Giant Pool of Spicy Chili Oil that is Really Goddamn Hot
3. Ma Po Tofu (You DO speaka Chinese! -ed.) Swimming in a Giant Pool of Spicy Chili Oil that is Really Goddamn Hot"

You found this review:
Useless
Embarrassing
Makes You Want To Shove Razors In Your Eyes

The $26 Glass of Veuve (or, No One Wants To Read Your Stupid Manifesto)

2010-12-16T09:33:00.000-08:00

So I hate lots of things, but especially this:

Don't skip intro! Don't do it!

You didn't skip it, did you? Good, because I HATES IT and it's so much better to HATES THINGS together.

Unless you're a hundred million, the thought of spending $44.95 on a main course of lobster tail at the sort of place that sends shrieks of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" at you from its hopelessly outdated website is about as appealing as a lapdance from Mick Foley. (Who apparently loves him some Tori Amos.)

Speaking of lapdances, if I'm spending $26 on a glass of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label (The King of ~~Beers~~ Champagnes!), I'd better be getting a lapdance. Gratuity included.

According to the Mark's website: "Eating" at Mark’s is truly a memorable dining experience.

I suppose "Eating" is in "quotes" because what you're doing isn't "Eating" so much as it is bleeding money out of your spiny-lobster-perforated innards, resulting in a financial sepsis that leads to projectile vomiting, spouse blaming, and - in many cases - a 22% APR.

And if by "memorable" you mean the opulence and showboatiness couldn't possibly be outdone unless you were dining in Notre Dame at midnight while the Bulgarian Women's Choir hooted out Christmas carols to your foot-high platings (is that a croquant set at an angle at the tippy top of my food pile? Spectacular!), then yeah, it's got to be.

Even if the food at this place is now and then really good, there's just no substitute for sincerity - call it the conceit of my generation, but we found the 80s a superbly entertaining bit of triviality, not to be carried on seriously now that we're grown-ups. I listen to 80s music all the time ("incessantly," says certain persons married to me), but I don't want to eat 80s.

We make fun (I make fun) of the bearded Brooklynite who carves his own utensils from co-op-grown bamboo and takes butchery classes (and yet still not butch!) and throws dinner parties devoted to his own closet-festered cheeses...but more and more, this is how I want our restaurants to look and feel. But not because they cynically put on these airs to be interviewed by the eager beavers at New York magazine (who sometimes remind me of the twentysomething babysitter I once had that let us do anything we wanted because he harbored some uncomfortably tangible need to be liked by children). Because their earnest little hearts want desperately to care about something the way our folks cared about Vietnam and civil rights.

Because we have no modern manifestos, but those regarding how we eat and drink. Economics bores our Ritalin-cured brains; politics are only digestible insomuch as they fit on our iPhone screens. Sex blackens and shrinks in a forgotten broiler - too hopelessly damaged and depressing to touch. We'll have to start over from scratch on that one.

But eating and drinking? The long-accepted pleasures of the mouth and bloodstream? That's worth a revolutionary's attention, isn't it?

Brillat-Savarin knew it, even in 1825:

"In the present state of our knowledge, we work on metals with other metals; we take hold of them with iron tongs, forge them with iron hammers, and cut them with steel files; but I have never yet met anyone who could explain to me how the first tongs were made and the first hammer forged."

-- The Physiology of Taste

So, carve on Bearded Brooklyn Boys, as you meander towards adulthood, balls blue with the hope and audacity you couldn't consummate as quickly and ferociously as you'd desired, and a Kiva loan out there somewhere, whittling its own small path through the darkness. Butcher away, you skinny-jeaned seekers of the primitive self, whose extreme measures are misguided (unless a 29-year lifespan is the goal) but dewy-headed with earnestness. Argue into the night about the difference between "real" and "natural" wines, and eschew marketing firms and Mega-purple. Each guffaw directed at your fixie is also a tiny cheer of the heart. For each cleaver swing, each tamp of the muddling stick, each plate of homegrown, homemade, lowrise of not-glistening or architected food is one step further away from blowhard Wine-Spectator-Award-boasting cruiseship aesthetics like this.

Selah.

approves this message

Edie Loves Everything!!!!!!!

2010-12-13T08:43:00.000-08:00

So I love going to new restaurants, especially ones that give me free food when I go because they know I'm a blogger and my words can really influence a person's decision to go. Which is a power I will not abuse, by the way, so don't even ask me to! Heeheeheehee.

In fact, I've been invited to a few "Influencer Events" since I started my food blog, Edie Loves Everything!!!!!!, which is totally an unexpected, happy perk. I had started it simply because I love to eat, and I love to talk, and I love....almost everything! Yay!

One time, this chef even came out of the kitchen during one of our blogger events and said he hoped we would all say really nice things about him and his restaurant, and that if we needed any more information to help us write our blog posts, we could contact his PR rep, a pretty lady getting trashed in the corner. She sort of half-waved, half-fell off her chair, and then the chef leaned on the table and started to cry a little bit. He muttered something about a Bernard Loiseau???? (of course I had to Google it—an old mentor, maybe?). Then he rubbed his face with his dirty towel and went back into the kitchen. We were all like, Whatever. My Tweet that night: OMG, chefs are soooo intense. It's because they're also creative. Ask me how I know LOL

So tonight, I went to this little wine bar by my house. I love it because it has hay on the floor and all the servers are dressed in green jumpsuits, like mechanics or something - yet, it's a wine bar! It's not trying to be anything it's not, in other words. It's like they're saying, "Yeah, we serve wine, but we don't care about it and so you don't have to, either!" It's way more fun this way.

We started with a plate of meat and cheese. It was manchego, I think, which is like, really, really hard to get and from somewhere far away, like Morocco. They cut it into these big cubes that reminded me of the cheese plate at all my work events; that's my favorite part of those parties, by the way. I sit there and spear cubes of orange, white—even green cheese, while all my coworkers just laugh 'cause they know I am so food-crazy! I'm just like, "What can I say? I love really good cheese." My favorite is brie. OMG, to die for.
<--- No brie. Sad face!

After finishing off my cheese cubes, I moved on to the meat. It was some sort of dried meat, like prosciutto. It was so yummy nummy nummers with the fig jam!!!!!! This place is really creative.

I drank a glass of something red that was really scrumptious because it tasted like a wine I had before that I really liked and someone told me was expensive. And this one wasn't! I drank two glasses of it. I think it was Spanish.

<--- like this, but Spanish

All in all, a really good wine bar and really good prices. I can't wait to be invited back! (Hint, hint) Thankfully, this time no one came out of the kitchen and cried. Hello - note to restaurants: that's a total buzzkill.

xo,
Edie

This Is Happening

2010-12-08T20:36:00.000-08:00

: It's me, bitches. I'm back.

You: Oh, were you gone?

: And I'm here to tell you that although I'm not a waitress anymore, I still have to endure more stupid bullshit on the Internet about food and wine than I can stand. So now you get to hear all about it.

You: You're going to keep making fun of Yelpers, aren't you?

: Yaaaarrrrr. And food bloggerz and Twitter Twats and fucking chefs, and....GRAWRRRR! PR releases!!! I FUCKING HATE PR RELEASES. THEY MAKE ME WANT TO SHAVE MY FACE LIKE BOB GELDOF IN "THE WALL."

You: And, hopefully, you'll keep giving us good recommendations for wines to drink that are crazy-affordable and natural and taste like real actual wine from a place made by people not robots and chemicals.

: Fuck yes. Now I'm about to go down on this 2002 Pierre Peters Cuvée Speciale like Mama Cass on a ham sandwich. Peace out.

It's Not You, It's Us

2010-11-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

: This is a very difficult decision for us, but we think it's time for you to move on.

Me: What? Why me?

: You have a bad attitude. And you're arrogant.

Me: Wait, is this because of the blog?

: What blog?

Me: Nothing.

: Lots of people complain about you.

Me: Customers? But they're always coming up to you and saying what a great server I was. The other night, a little girl and her parents waited for me to finish at another table so they could say thanks.

: No, not customers.

Me: Who then? My coworkers? We get along great.

: Just people. You've been awful for about a year. I keep thinking it's because of the wedding, but now that's over and you still suck.

Me: Is this because I don't go out drinking with you guys after work? Look, I get tired and want to go home. It doesn't mean I don't get along with you all. What about the lake? All summer by the pool? Was I "awful" then?

: Maybe we just don't get you. Maybe we're just not the right group of people for you.

Me: Is it because I never 1)screamed at you in a parking lot in full view of customers? 2)insulted your taste in wine to the owners? 3)gave my husband free drinks at the bar? 4)got drunk on the job? 5)no-showed? 6)threatened, while drunk, our female sous chef with violence...twice? 7)stood in the middle of our crowded bar area and loudly, grumpily declared brunch a chaotic mess that I would never work again?* (see editor's note)

: ...

Me: Look, I'm no stranger to criticizing myself, often to a deluded and scary point. But let's get real here: All my friends, new and old, all the acquaintances I make daily who seem to like me just fine, all the colleagues and associates I work with...none of these people have had the acute intuition and ability to judge character that you guys have? Which is why no one has delivered such a strangely impassioned personal attack on me since I was in the sixth grade?

***RE-ENACTMENT**

: I guess so.

Me: And this has nothing to do with my other job as a restaurant critic? You said "a year," and that's about when I started writing for them full time. Do you think I'm a defector or something?

: Nope.

And just then, the dark lord Cthulu swept down and annihilated the restaurant, the increasingly boring wine list, the fragile egos and hypocrisies, and made me his queen. And because it's my fucking fantasy and I can do what I want, he let my husband and dog come, too. And we all live in Denmark and get free health care and no one minds a smart president.

THE END

*: True story! All things other servers did and did not get fired for...except for the threatening the chef, but that had to happen twice before any action was taken.

But...Where's the Wood?

2010-10-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

: I want a glass of wine, but I don't know any of these.

Me: What do you normally like to drink, even though I know you are going to say "Oaky Cab Sauvs"?

: Oaky Cab Sauvs.

Me:

: ...

Me: We don't have one of those. But try this (pouring a taste of Carneros Pinot Noir and a Valpolicella Ripasso). The first one has the style you want, but the second has the weight.

: Hmmm...um...uhn...

Me: Okay, try this. I normally don't go in for Mendoza Malbec, but this one is really balanced. It won't be oaky but it is stylistically and weight-wise the closest thing you're going to get to what you normally like. And hey, why not try something new?

: Hunh....mmmm....ssssooo confuuuused....must...have...oak!

Me: Or let's do something totally different but that you'll love: a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo. It's like cocoa-dusted raspberries and—

: Raspberries?!?! In WINE?!

: You do know wine is made from grapes, right?

: I'd never think of raspberries and wine...or cocoa...and WINE?

Me: There's a lot of fruit to smell in wine when there isn't a whole forest of oak to mask it.

: But oaky wines are always the most expensive.

Me: Yes! You've hit upon something that's very controversial in the wine industry. It's the effort on the part of winemakers to please Robert Parker and his peers, a bizarre oligarchy of mouths that only respond to oak, plum, coffee, chocolate, smoke, and—provided there's enough of the stuff I just mentioned—tobacco. So any wine forcibly made to taste like these things get higher points and higher prices.

: (Pointing to a funky, poopy-licious biodynamic Rhône Syrah on the menu). I'll just have the Syrah. Is that like a Shiraz?

: Yes. Yes it is.

And Please Don't Do This, Either

2010-10-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

There's this new one I get all the time, and - surprise! - it really pisses me off.
It's this: How come you know so much about wine?

I get this from probably 1-2 guests per night, or 4-6 per week. It's like a UTI that just won't clear up. You start to feel relaxed again, the wincing pain in the vajayzer has begun to subside and then - WHAMMO. How come you know so much about wine?

Lists calm me down, so here's a list of Reasons This Makes Me Crazy:

1) I don't know so much about wine. You just know that little. And that's okay, but what you are implying by How Come...? is that I shouldn't know something you don't, OR that wine is a subject upon which you think you should be an expert, and therefore, it's bewildering that you aren't, even though you read Wine Spectator in your podiatrist's office.

2) Because it's my job, dumbass. What do you do for a living? Well gosh, I hope you know some shit about it.

3) Because I give a care. I realize that in this town, most servers are stoned, hungover, or between 12-step meetings, but I do it because I stupidly believe in the restaurant I work for, and I stupidly believe I can change someone's life by getting them to drink Lagrein from Alto Adige instead of California Merlot. Stupid stupid stupid.

4) If you walk into a nice-looking restaurant with a "challenging" menu that changes daily and a wine list full of names you've never heard of, chances are, you're not at a fucking Burger King. Are you really surprised that the server knows "so much about wine"? How about the fact that they know the steak is dry-aged, the difference between a rabbit rillette and rabbit confit, and where the oysters are from? Is that shocking to you?

5) Oh yeah, stop asking me "REAL RABBIT?" as if that's the craziest thing you've ever heard of. Well, it probably is if you eat at Burger King all the time.

6) Every single person who asks me why I know so much about wine totally ignores my advice anyway. Then they ask me a series of even dumber questions designed to give them a chance to participate, like "What's your favorite? Mine's La Crema;" or "I bet you're a red girl, huh?" Shut up and drink what I told you to get and let's have a conversation about that instead. It's going to be much more interesting than whatever brilliant gem you gleaned from the latest mid-rate freelancer's article in GQ.
<-- Is totes down with Lagrein. "It's so plummy but not overly extracted, and the long, lean, herbal finish is tits!"

The long story is: I "know so much about wine" because I have an obsessive-compulsive attraction to things that can be classified. I also have been with a sommelier for the last 4 years who is a walking encyclopedia of wine, so I made him teach me everything he knows. But I did all this because I love to learn and because I use it in my profession, and want one to benefit from the other. And if you're going to do anything - stuff envelopes, catch fish, sell wine, make wine - go big or go home.

So quit asking me stupid questions, dispense with your weird hang ups and insecurity issues and drink the "weird" Lagrein. You'll thank me one day.

I Make Don Draper Cry

2010-09-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

Me: Hey Don Draper, why so sad?

: You made fun of me for drinking oaky Chardonnay, not knowing that rosé wasn't sweet, leaving bad tips, and asking for my fish to be filleted.

Me: Yeah, well, those things are fucking irritating. And they do make you look like a big idiot to the people you're trying to impress who know more about food and wine than you do.

: BUT NO ONE SHOULD KNOW MORE ABOUT WINE AND FOOD THAN ME!!

Me: It's "I." And yes they should. Do you go to your mechanic and sound like a know-it-all? Wait, nevermind. Of course you do. And your doctor? Probably that, too.

: Well, I just don't want service people taking advantage of me because they know stuff I don't.

Me: So you would prefer professionals whose expertise you seek to NOT have more expertise than you?

: Yes. That's why I believe in a god that couldn't possibly be smart enough to come up with evolution and hate uppity intellectuals who went to college and think they know how to run the country.

Me: Surely there's some stuff you know that I don't.

: ....

Me: You're right. That was ridiculous. And motherfucker, you're good-looking.

Sweet Berry Wine!

2010-08-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

Today in Thanks Yelp A**hole, Next Time I'll Just Ask My Dog:

"The wine was light and had a strong fruit/berry flavor."

This might be a good time to revisit John C. Reilly's best work ever ever!

Here, try this. It's the same fucking thing you drink every night.

2010-08-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

Me: Can I help you with the wine list at all?

: I'm just trying to find a wine.

Me: Red or white?

: WHITE! I NEVER drink red. Ech. I want something that's not dry but not sweet but I don't like a lot of oak... And no Pinot Grigio.

Me: I'll let you in on a little secret. "Dry" is the most useless word to people selling you wine. It means something completely different to everyone. Let's try this instead: I'll pour you a taste and you tell me where to go from there. (Pouring William Fevre 2008 Chablis without her seeing the label).

: Hmmm. Hmmm. (Hands it to boyfriend, unable to form a conclusion on her own.) What do you think?

(Shrugs)

: It's too... too...

Me: Is the acid too high? Do you want something creamier or more mouth-filling?

: Um, not CREAMY. But not, I don't know, what was that word you used?

Me: Never mind. Here try this. (Pouring a slightly honeyed, softer Soave.)

: Woah, this is SWEET.

Me: OK. How's the feel on the tongue, though? Is that level of acid good for you?

: Nnnnnh. Mmmm. Emmmm. Uhhhh.

Me: Do you like Sauvignon Blanc?

: NO! I HATE SAUVIGNON BLANC!

Me: Okay, I think this is our winner then. (pouring a taste of Pinot Grigio. Scarpetto, which is truly decent)

: Mmm! That's PERFECT! What is it?

Me: Pinot Grigio.

: Dang it! I keep trying to drink something besides Pinot Grigio, but I can't seem to get away from it!

Me:

From Cosmo to Chablis in 60 seconds

2010-07-29T11:28:00.001-07:00

"I'll have a cosmo," said the woman I waited on last night. We only have a beer and wine list, and I told her so.
"If you were in the mood for a cosmo, I'd suggest one of our rosés. We have several by the glass, and some have this great red fruitiness that--"
"NO," she waved her hands around. "I don't want sweet." Said the woman who asked for a cosmo.

I explained that rosés aren't sweet, that she's thinking of spending her teenage years parked outside a DQ with a 40-oz. styro of Boone's Farm warming up on the dashboard. Well, I didn't say so in as many words.

Dumbass.

I brought her a taste anyway, of Chateau d'Oupia, a wonderful Languedoc rosé with a coy strawberry smile and creamy little tongue. A whisper of granite on the finish gives it elegance and beauty, keeps it from being too slutty.

"Nah," said the woman. "I think I'll just have this Chablis." A Chablis that's like licking an oyster shell dipped in lime juice.

You know, I give up listening to people tell me what the fuck they want. They don't even know.

People Love Themselves on Yelp, the coda

2010-07-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm back to reviewing restaurants regularly while also maintaining my pink-collar loyalties a few nights a week (the subject of an essay I will work on right after my graphic novel about the customers who have sucked most—enter now for a chance to win a guest appearance!—and my memoir about trauma and tragedy, affectionately called "The Dead Mom Opus").

Couple that with my freelance work on a wine website, and you have three—hahaha, three!—jobs to help me barely get by while trying to buy things like wedding rings and little stringy white lights.

Ah Ah Ah! You're getting married in a recession, Dumbass!

That also means I'm back to perusing Yelp boards to try and understand the opposing points of view, or at least the popular conception of a restaurant I am writing up, having lost the faint scent of anyone there who even remotely knows what they're talking about (by now they've all ejected and started their own blogs - so have plenty of people who know absolutely nothing).

Thus resumes my frequent venting about Yelp (and other hyper-democratized online reviews) so that I don't grind my teeth into powder and say "I Do" with one eye twitching madly.

Here's a great kick-off:

Authentic! <--remember this for later
I was delighted by how wonderful and fresh this new Latin restaurant was.

My Bistec and Carnitas tacos were amazingly flavorful if not a bit small for liking. The Spinach Salad with Jicama, mandarin oranges, walnuts , queso fresco and a light vinaigrette were such a surprise and contradiction to the standard ICEBERG and GUACAMOLE salad at most Latin restaurants...

There's so much wrong with this clutch of words that I can't even ridicule it. Not without Photoshop. Let's see what I can do with Snagit Beta in thirty seconds...I do have three jobs, after all.

Clicky:

Please send Photoshop, ASAP.

Week in Wankers: Meet Julian Sanchez

2010-07-17T09:34:00.001-07:00

Hi, I'm Julian Sanchez. My friends call me "Dirty Sanchez," "Sancho," "Tubby Bitch," and sometimes "Jeff," because they really don't know who the hell I am. It's my girlfriend who's friends with everyone; I just sort of tag along. In fact, I spend most of our happy hours, dinners, and other gatherings gazing into my iPhone screen, typing desperately boring and misspelled Yelps and Tweets with my sausage thumbs.

So, last night, we all went out for one of my girlfriend's friend's birthdays, to some nice restaurant that they all like for some reason. I don't get it. I think the best meal in town is the "Big Ass Burger" at Carl's Jr. It goes down awesome with a vodka Red Bull, which is my favorite drink because it not only makes me go to the dark place, but it gives me plenty of energy to pick fights with strangers while I'm in it. Fuck yeah, dawg!

So there were about 14 of us—at least I think so—I only got ten fingers to count on, you know. And the waitress was this sassy little bitch—kept trying to act all smart, like talking to people about what wine they'd like to drink, or what beers were the "hoppiest." Shut up and refill my glass of ice so I can pour vodka Red Bull in it from the plastic bottle I brought in. Oh yeah, and bring more glasses of ice for this end of the table, so they can all drink free booze in your stupid fancy restaurant, too. Let the elitist assholes at the other end of the table drink your "wine" and "draft beer," thankyouverymuch.

Lucky for me, the restaurant likes my girlfriend's friends enough to have let us bring in our own hootch, because this party sucked; those guys weren't even looking my way or talking to me at all, which I didn't really care about because I had my iPhone and my vodka Red Bull. But when that smartass broad came to wipe down our table and set more silverware or whatever whoopty-doo-I'm-all-important-look-at-me thing she was doing, I was bored, so I said, "Hey! Hey!" and when I had our half of the table's attention, I pointed out how she was running her ass off.

Women like to hear stuff like that, like what a good job they're doing, blah blah blah. I expected her to high five me, or maybe suggest a meeting in the bathroom, you know? But instead she said, all snarky like, that she hoped that wasn't a "verbal tip," and when everyone asked what that was, she explained it. That it's when a customer says something really nice about a waitress and then tips her, like, 13% or something. They all thought that was funny for some reason but then this blonde lady next to me—no one was talking to her, either (I checked her out for a second, but she was fugly, a real butterface, if you know what I mean)—anyway, this hag says "Well, it's better than nothing." Man, you shoulda seen the hideous sneer on this witch when she said it! I wanted to high five her right there. The waitress was all, "Hey, I've got med school to pay off," like she's some fuckin' comedian or something, and the hag's husband or whatever laughed.

If there's one thing I hate, it's chicks getting the last laugh. So when she split all our checks and laid them down, announcing that she forgot to put a gratuity on 'em but she's not worried because they're all regulars or whatever, blah blah blah and they all had their cutesy laugh and lovefest, I showed her.

On the tip line of my credit card receipt, I drew an unhappy face with tears spraying out of it and wrote "wah wah wah!" Ha ha! I nearly had to put down my iPhone to keep my hands steady I was so excited. I kind of hoped a little that she'd confront me about it so I could choke the life outta her. I told you I go to the dark place, yo.

When we all walked out to our car, I saw her standing outside with the chef and owner who had come talked to our table before. She had brought out a signed menu for their birthday and all this stuff. I bet she thinks she's so great. I just stood there in the parking lot and they were looking at me and I was looking at them, and although it was dark, I'm pretty sure she could see the truth, cause it was right there in my eyes. I'm the fuckin' king. You mess with me, I'm gonna mess with you.

Later, some joker said that they hoped she didn't find out where I worked and somehow find a way to mess with my income. Whatever. A dumb waitress wouldn't know how to do that.

Would she?

Week in Wankers

2010-06-05T22:16:00.000-07:00

"Can you send this whole grilled fish, described exactly as thus on the menu, back to the kitchen so they can filet it? I really don't want it looking at me. Har har. Meanwhile, my husband and daughter will be forced to fold their hands dutifully in their laps and watch as their own food cools and congeals before them."

Said this thing the other night.

Week in Wankers: the weekend crew

2010-04-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

Working both Friday and Saturday this week, which, for an old pro (or even a young and spritely tyro) is just one of those necessary miseries that you don't bother to complain about, like how a chambermaid dumps a piss pot.

But for those of us who, while in good shape (thanks, YMCA's clean and well-maintained facilities!), may be yellowing around the edges a bit, clocking in on a Saturday after the ass-kicking received on a Friday feels exactly like this. If Friday night (Amateur Night, Part One) is any indication of the cross-section I can expect to wait upon this evening, I will be faced with the following:

Loud, older Texans with loads of money and absolutely no taste, whose wigged wives wave their turquoise rings in my face and describe the "big, oaky, buttery Chardonnay" they want me to bring them. (Hint: Bring them anything, so long as it's undergone malolactic fermentation. That's all they really want. And if everything you have is stainless-steel-fermented, bring them a glass of half & half with some popcorn floating in it.)

Aging hippies who take off their shoes and sit cross-legged on the banquette, so that all incoming persons will be forced to be witnesses to her rock-bottom Britney moment. Aging hippies part two, who come in reeking of patchouli so that everyone around them, instead of enjoying the native aromas of their eye-poppingly good lamb chops and Chinons, are forced to recall that college performance of "Godspell" they had to usher for fine arts credit.

That champion douchebag who insists on sitting next to—instead of across from—his lady at a two-top, thus invading the personal space of whoever is at the table next to him, performing an unnecessarily raucous turning of the table to fit their needs, and in such a way that sends silverware rocketing off said table and onto the floor. As waitress first protests, "Please, sir, let me do that for you," is ignored, and then forced to return with new silverware, heroic asshole smirks, "Did that just totally mess up your vibe?" (Find out if having the busboy fart on his salad messes up his vibe.)

The young lady who, because she ignored my brief (and apparently necessary) overview of the menu at the beginning of the night, is stunned to find out that the "Whole Grilled Branzino" on the menu is, in fact, whole, and forces me to send it back to the kitchen for fileting. Which, by the way, no modern kitchen or chef who has cooked abroad wants to do, because it not only kills the exquisite presentation, effectively reducing the glorious fish to a pile of glossy flakes, but because it's fucking lazy. ("Make my food into a pile I can shovel into my mouth without focus." America, what a country!) If you're blind and have no teeth, you can still negotiate a branzino's skeletal structure. Then again, if you're blind and have no teeth, I suggest the soup.

This being date night, any number of the men who will be walked out on by their drunk, belligerent wives/girlfriends/ex-wives/mistresses/"nieces" and who will leave me a 12% tip, despite having forced me into an incredibly awkward situation, which I will have handled with great aptitude, if I do say so myself. When he asks a group of us at the front if we saw where she walked off to, one of us supposes she went to find an ATM to get the rest of my tip.

As Adrian said to Rocky as he prepared to fight Ivan Drago, "You can't win!"

But then, sitting at the bar later tonight, counting my rubles, I'll think of this.

Eggs Benedict Arnold

2010-03-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'm finally done with the restaurant guide and can begin to till the stinky soil of these posts with some more waitressing rants and stories. I am grateful for the opportunity to vent whenever, in the course of my work, I had to brush up against the rancid pus lake that is Yelp, and all of its unholy tributaries of meritless conjecture like CitySearch, Chowhound, and The Austin Chronicle. *wink!*

I will miss statements like "First of all, I don't know if I'm dining at the wrong places but the sushi in TX is not as fresh as in Chicago."

I'm working on an essay about the experience of being a waitress-restaurant critic (a real, paid one bound by ethical and professional standards). It's called "Turncoat: The Eggs Benedict Arnold Story."

I've been working a lot of brunches lately. Something I never thought I'd do after shacking up with a guy whose predilection towards eating brunch together over the Sunday NY Times is such that, when threatened by other plans - like a party or dim sum invitation with, shudder, other people; or being in a dusty West Texas town with no NY Times in it - he actually gets inside the laundry basket and cowers there, weeping.

Brunch can be really great. It's fast as hell, so time passes more quickly; and the turnover is high, so even if a table has really bad mojo ("I'll just have water;" or "I'm too hungover/tired/stuck up inside my own asshole to say 'please' and 'thank you.'"), they'll be out of your life in no time. The energy among the waitstaff is funny, too, as we all are cranked up on coffee, adrenaline, or that crack-in-a-cup 5-Hour Energy, plus the insistent willpower to not fall apart at the expo line when an order of French toast has taken 30 minutes in the middle of the rush.

If working the dining room on a Friday or Saturday night can feel for an hour like battle, brunch is three hours of a dirty, bloody, cheek-rending, hair-pulling South Carolina bar fight. Someone's definitely getting fucked against their will.

Worst of all, the ratio of uptight, middle-aged (I'm calling 55 and higher middle-aged, because, come on...45 is still pretty fucking happening) church-goers is noticeably higher, and so the tip percentage goes down to an average of 13-15% from the standard fine dining 20%. Evangelicals look for any reason to obliterate that tip, so Sunday brunch must be like heaven for them.

The justification for a lower brunch tip cannot be that brunch somehow requires less work - certainly not. We wake up at 7:30 am on a Sunday, while most of our peers are peacefully snoring or having morning sex, to come down here and pour cup after cup of coffee for you. By the time most of the city is awake and kayaking around the lake, walking their dogs in the park, or kicking back with some huevos rancheros on a sunny patio with friends, we are delivering our 50th eggs Benedict to some sneering hag who apparently requires a hose to constantly pour decaf down her miserable gullet.

But you know, we also get the industry people - tables of four waiters and waitresses with sunglasses on, the cracking voices of those who have partied hard and are enjoying their day off, who applaud joyfully when you bring them mimosas, who are happy to be alive and eating lots of good food and not serving the assholes at the table next to them.

I hereby decree that everyone work a Sunday brunch once a year, if only to appreciate how wonderful it is not to. I am happy to be back amongst you, diners and colleagues - antagonistic though you may sometimes be. Although I find criticism - in its classic form - to be useful and necessary, a constant reminder of the gold standard by those who are exquisitely qualified in contextual analysis, I find it a bit like butchery - best left to those with the stomach for it.

More Writing Commandments

2010-03-04T09:48:00.001-08:00

Let's talk about lazy, sloppy food writing. The following words are hereforthwith unbearable and may result in traffic accidents while I try to drive while bleeding from multiple orifices on my face:

Offerings - food, menu items, wines, whatever. Stop calling them "offerings." It brings to mind loin-clothed natives kneeling and presenting various choices of bành mí or smoothies before a foodie god (see "Foodie," below).

Nestled - a Chinese hole in the wall doesn't "nestle" in the corner of a strip mall. Fawns nestle; Easter eggs nestle. Acceptable alternatives: squatting, lurking, and emitting off-putting smells.

Foodie - every time you say this, a butterfly gets eaten by Andrew Zimmern. Adding a cutesy "-ie" to the end of a word we all require to survive implies a ridiculously misplaced sense of superiority. Instead, why not "epicurean" or "gastronome"? Oh yeah, because it doesn't disarm those around you who might mistake you for someone smart and grown up. Scary-wary! To be fair, plenty of people for whom I have a great deal of respect have succumbed to this word usage, just like that one time my boyfriend got bit by the zombie and we had to cut off his head. That sucked almost as much.

Yummy/Nummers/Nom-nom/Nom - see what I did there? Read out loud, that shows the precise decay of the English language, once a very fine language (but before that, absolute garbage, an ungainly mishmash of Germanic and Romantic languages). It's like the whole Kristen/Kirsten/Kiersten/Karsten/Kastin/Smashmash/Glahgah thing. Our brains are sloshing around in our heads from all the high fructose corn syrup and this is how it manifests. If you say "nom nom" at a hospital cafeteria, I do believe they will rush you to the ER, mistaking you for a stroke victim. Or maybe it's no mistake.

It's really just laziness, which, when you troll the food blogs and free-for-all review sites, is blisteringly common -- no, most people are not writers, but now they can be read by just about anyone. The danger is that we are an impressionable species - already, I've seen apostrophes misused by even businesses who paid a great deal of money for professional signage.
"Saturday's and Sunday's!"
"Walk in's welcome!"

With our education system in ruins, don't you think kids are going to grow up thinking that's the correct usage? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Never mind them, plenty of grown-ups are mimicking each other's lusterless, dull language.

Oh yes, which reminds me:

Lackluster - the use of "lackluster" to describe food, experiences, wines, whathaveyou is just silly, given that the word itself is lackluster. Again, it's lazy to point out what something isn't rather than having to think about what it is. (And I know lazy.) Except "mirthless"... "mirthless" rules.

Examples of better words than "lackluster": sullen, limpid, flaccid, puny, dull, blah (blah is okay - it's onomatopoeic, the sound of barfing; unlike "yummy," which is just insipid.)

Words best convey your feelings when they put an image in the reader's mind. Words with no image - you can tell them by their lack of poetry - are lazy words. And if you don't care, you're not really a writer, no matter how many "hits" or "cools" your posts get.

It's a brave new world, but time will sort you out.

People Love Themselves on Yelp, volume 5

2010-02-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

Yeah, technically, Talking Back to Yelpers As If They Can hear Me counted as a People Love Themselves on Yelp, so this should be Volume 6, but crazy compulsive head makes big exploding noise when numerical sequence upset and fiancé is too nice to deserve cleaning up exploded head.

So... volume 5: Making sure People Know Your Yelp Review is a Fucking Useless Waste of Time

Having never had banh mi before my wife and I went here for lunch. I had the banh mi Tom special (garlic shrimp) while she had the barbequed pork banh mi. We shared an egg roll appetizer and also had a cream puff for dessert. Food was great. Having never had banh mi neither of us have anything to compare it too but it had a lot of flavor. My only complaint is quite a bit of salt in the shrimp. The pork was good though (I had a bite of hers).

When it comes to dim sum, I can be a little bit picky since I grew up in Hong Kong... To me, all dim sum item's gotta have the right taste, right texture, and served at the right temperature. (The rest of us, on the other hand, like it slimy, rancid, and ice cold. Fucktard.)

If you want to know if a dim sum restaurant is really good, you ask anyone with Cantonese parents if they'd bring their parents here for dim sum, then you'd know... =) And from what I experienced, I would have no problems bringing my parents here when they visit. (I'm calling bullshit on this constant assertion that being a member of a certain ethnic group guarantees a supremacy of palate, a culinary genius, a genetic mutant grand mastery of aesthetics and execution. Do they not have the equivalent of Applebee's in any other country on Earth? Do hordes of mindless fools not hunker down in the Cantonese equivalent of a TGI Friday's? Knock it off. Be logical: bad taste is not a strictly Anglo trait.)

It's a Cantonese restaurant. But we ordered Mapo tofu which is Sichuan food. So it's not authentic at all. (Yeah, inauthentic Cantonese restaurant- stay on your turf! By the way, Mexican places with breakfast tacos? Fuck you, too! And then she says...) I ordered seafood hotpot which doesn't have much flavors. My other friends like it because they don't want any flavors. (Oh, snap! Table for one, please. Forever.)

Night-Off Eavesdropping

2010-01-29T09:24:00.000-08:00

How you know you're sitting next to a First Date at the bar:

She tells him, "I really only drink maybe 2, 3 glasses when I'm out with friends and even that's not very often. I'm a believer in moderation. After this, I'm going to work out, from about 9-10."

"After your mother's? Wow, that's commitment."

"I'm not afraid of commitment."

A stiff pause. She's got it in for him. He's the next one, after all.

Later, he is telling her, "Life insurance is an investment, really," and I feel like I have his whole story down. I mean, don't you?

They ask for the check and the woman leans across him to ask me if I enjoyed my soup.

"Oh yes," I say, "It was watercress and andouille sausage. Awesome."

"You look like you were enjoying it. I love soup."

I wonder what looking like I was "enjoying it" looked like to her, and why it warranted a conversation. I dab at my mouth with the side of my hand, just to be safe.

I tell her I think I recognize her.

I ask if she used to frequent the last restaurant I worked at, a popular upmarket Japanese place. Her long, middle-aged face is so familiar, despite the heavy black eyeliner disguise she dons tonight. I know her horsey nose, her lantern jaw.

"I live in the neighborhood," she answers. "Did you ride your bike?" I nod, wondering if she saw me pull up, what made her need to make a point of talking to me with her date watching. In the world of women, this is a disarmament. A polite stare-down of sorts.

She introduces herself and her date. Joy and Chris.

"I own a company, I go to people's houses and organize."

I give it a beat. "Well, God bless you!" I say, more to Chris than to her. They both laugh, but she not as much.

I do not see a second date. Maybe, but not a third.

Then the coworkers come. They line up at the bar and I figure that the girl at the end is British because the alpha male on the end closest to me keeps shouting "Oi! Oi!" to her when she isn't paying attention. One of the girls asks pointedly how his love life is. "Kevin, how's your love life?" They've had too much to drink. This will either bond them or make things weird at work on Monday.

"I'm an Aquarian," he says. "Impossible to date."

The girl next to the Brit squeals. "I'm a Leo! We're supposed to be perfect together!"

Kevin begins to talk about being attracted to girls who are projects and the girls holler at once. "I know about projects!" All women think they know about projects. This implies all men are projects. The truth is, all of us are projects. Some projects build our muscles and some tear them down. You have to know who you are to know which project to pick. I almost offer this p.o.v. but there's too much estrogen in the group as it is. We'll give Kevin a break.

The Brit asserts she has found the man she is going to marry and Kevin waves his hands about, "Hello….! What? That's awe-rsome….I had no idea." He is too eager to hear about it. He is disappointed the Brit is in love, you can tell. "Tell me about this guy!"

He wants to hear the guy is just like him. Or worse than him. That way, he has a shot. Not just at her, but someone like her. He needs to know that someone like him would have a shot at someone like her.

She has circumvented the rest of the girls to talk to him beside his chair, standing up. A girl will do this to talk about the man she loves. Kevin will not do this – will not abandon his comfortable seat to ask her more closely. Instead he stays seated, not waiting for her, not expecting her to come over and tell him, not even thinking about it, his question beyond answer, his look faraway even as she speaks right into his face about love.

Foodie Guilt

2010-01-26T22:53:00.001-08:00

I want to replace the word "foodie" with something else. First of all, adding a diminutive "-ie" to the end of anything used to describe adults makes me want to punch a panda. (Those things really don't want to live, anyway. Look it up.)
Secondly, to add "-ie" to any mundane noun that we all require for survival is just asinine.

I'm an airie! No one enjoys breathing more than I do. I can identify different types of air. This one is cold; this one is warm and thick -- ooh! This one reminds us of the air we breathed that one time in fucking ROME. Have you been to fucking ROME? You should go. You'll love the air.

Food is a sensual experience. It transcends the metabolic and becomes, like art and music, that which nourishes our imaginations, our aesthetics, the undefinable soul. You can eat a Big Mac and instantly be seven years old again, sitting across from your grandmother in those shiny plastic booths looking at a Mayor McCheese statue. You can bite a forkful of risotto and be in Piedmont on your first Europe trip, scared to death of your new lover and picking fights to make sure they aren't going to just leave you there when things get ugly.

I once took a bite of refried beans at this old-school Tex-Mex dive and cried a little. Of all the refried beans in town, these were the exact flavor of those found in a bean and cheese burrito I used to get every day before work in San Clemente, CA. It was right before my mom died. I was living in my car and on friends' couches. I was 22 and wrote and drew in a huge sketch book every day. I was free and my whole life was before me and I ate this damned burrito until it proclaimed itself the author of this whole period of my life. Surely you have a burrito like that.

Anyhow, I get it. You love food. But you want to distinguish yourself from the others who love food - you really love food. But you aren't a chef or anything. You might have read Jeffrey Steingarten, watch "Top Chef" religiously, cook from the Julia Childs cookbook. Have a subscription to Bon Appetit.

Or let's go a step higher, yes?

You took a cooking-class vacation in Emilia-Romagna; you went to Brooklyn to learn to take apart a pig. You wear a t-shirt that says "Offal sweet." You read everything you can get your hands on about food, cooking, even hunting.
You're committed (or rich).

Awesome. Terrific. Passion = good. Learning = good. You want to define it. Who you are, your commitment. You want to say Take me seriously, give me the good eats, because I ain't no plebian palate!

So "foodie." This is it. The moniker for both types, and everything in between. Maybe you hate it and want a better word, but you hesitate to come up with one because you tend to shirk such easy definitions of yourself. And "food snob" makes you insanely sick to your stomach (or should).

To you demoted souls, I feel you. Just remember, a person is defined by their actions. Order the tongue and I'll appreciate your foodieness. Mostly, order it without pomp or a weird affected accent (you wouldn't believe how often I get this when guys order, especially wine), or a sinister wink to your date (rettttch), and I'll appreciate that you Get It. That you are One of the Good Ones. You are a better lover, a better liver, and a better companion.

But show up in my section and make tortured, twisted faces when I suggest the lamb's tongue sautéed with wild-honey pan sauce, but announce that because you are such big "foodies," then you "should get it," and I will know you for the insecure, bandwagon-leaping imposters that you are.

And you are legion.

So...mad....need....puppies

2010-01-25T21:01:00.000-08:00

Talking back to Yelpers as if they can hear me

2010-01-14T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm no sushi expert, but Maki Toki has everything I want in a sushi place at a very reasonable price. During happy hour, it's even cheaper.

If you've ever eaten at Maki Toki, you'll know this guy means that he likes depressing, sterile strip malls; flatscreen TVs; Romanian teenagers; sushi bars with not one remotely Southeast-Asian-looking chef; a selection of four fish that all taste identical and are sinewy, slimy, and cloudy; Beyoncé; and mushy, bland rice.

"No sushi expert"? Pal, you're not even reading the pamphlets.

First of all, I am very shocked to see so many negative reviews about this incredible rice and raw fish heaven. I am only the biggest sushi and seafood fan I've ever met, and pretty sure anyone's ever met, so this is confusing to me.

It's easy to be the biggest sushi and seafood fan you've ever met when you're the only person who can stand you.

More that I just cannot respond to because a language hasn't been invented yet that's capable of reaching across the internet and choking someone to death:

It was the oddest antipasto with a lot of pickled stuff. I don't like pickles.

I love Pad Thai. When I usually go out to eat Thai, it's always the one dish I like to try at every restaurant- each having their own distinct taste and style.

The place is too stinky to have decent seafood

Week in Wankers: The Big 'Un

2010-01-05T08:43:00.001-08:00

We got this crazy email from a customer complaining that he bought the special advertised by the server and was upset by the price when the bill showed up.

Let me break it down for you: he had classic sticker-shock and, instead of being angry with himself for not asking how much the special cost before ordering it (a dinner of filet mignon topped with foie gras - something most people living above ground and not breathing in toxic, brain-melting chemicals might consider a red flag for expense), he took it out on his server, complaining that they ought to have told the price up front.

I have never, in any city, - whether at an awful chain restaurant or an upmarket fine dining establishment - had the price of the special(s) offered to me without asking for it. It's considered rude and indelicate to discuss such matters without invitation, as if you're implying that the diner cannot afford it. If they need to know, they will ask. No one buys a fucking Range Rover without knowing the price; no one plucks shirts and jeans and shoes off of shelves without checking (okay plenty of wealthy people do, but fuck 'em anyway); so why buy a dinner - something you can't return, and one that includes two traditionally pricey components - without asking the price, if you think that price will be an issue for you?

Personal responsibility. This guy probably goes home and moans and cries about having to pay taxes so poor people can get the bare minimum of medical care or food stamps for their kids, all the while blubbering that they should take "personal responsibility".

Then he comes to a nice restaurant, orders filet mignon with foie gras, and bitches about it costing $4-6 more than the average filet mignon - sans fattened goose liver - at any steakhouse in town.

And for that we have to change our policy and do what even Chili's doesn't do, and announce the price right at the table. Why stop there? I'm going to make customers guess the price and if they win, I'll throw in some extra bread. Maybe throw 'em, a ticker-tape parade. And wear flair.

Thanks, tacky asshole. Good luck with those three spirits next Christmas.

And the Biggest Mouthbreather on Earth Award Goes To....

2009-10-26T16:24:00.001-07:00

This one is credited to my friend, R (who shall go nameless because I do not want hordes of jackass Yelpers to flame her blog, although they are welcome to try here):

Reason #62 why no restaurateur should ever, ever take Yelp seriously

10/22/2009

WTF?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am still trying to get over my shock and subsequent bewilderment after opening my Shack Lunch box and discovering taco meat, sour cream, shredded lettuce and cheese on...wait for it....A THICK FRENCH BREAD BUN. Yes, just like a taco meat sandwich. If you can even wrap your mind around that. I barely can. To be fair, after picking up the pieces of my mind, when I reviewed the website menu to see for myself that the description indicated this, it (kinda) does. See for yourself:

Shack Lunch
5.99
The Shack Torta sandwich with your choice of meat, lettuce, tomato, cheese and sour cream served with rice and beans. (taco meat, beef fajita, chicken fajita, carne guisada)

So, yes, it does say "sandwich", but when you're going to a place called Taco Shack, your mind can't even begin to comprehend that one of these could come on a thick sandwich bun. The very idea of it is wrong on so many levels.

If this post blew your fucking mind as much as it did ours, feel free to start a Yelp account and let Austin's Rachel D.know that she may, in fact, be the only human being in Austin who doesn't know that a torta is a sandwich and that she should perhaps stick to huffing glue for lunch.

People Love Themselves on Yelp, volume 4

2009-10-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

This one was such a magnificent disaster, I had to reprint the entire review. It is not only uncomfortably creepy, but the showboaty pseudo-fiction tone is just hilarious. There are some people on Yelp who write these would-be noir sort of reviews, but I'd rather eat my own toenails off than read any work of "Fiction" these guys write when they've finally managed to stop furiously jacking off in the mirror.

Njoy:

Sauntering into Bastas on a sweltering hot afternoon, I found myself in a quaint little restaurant obviously inspired by the Italian bistros of the Napa Valley.

I sat myself at the bar and admired the rows of Italian wines on prominent display. Associations of good times past kindled my memory as I studied vintages that I've enjoyed previously.

Draped in an elegant black dress, the lovely bartender inquired on what refreshment was necessary to quench my parched palate.

"Your choice", I said.

"What do you like to drink?"

"Whiskey."

Revealing a thin smile from the side of her slender lips, she proceeded to prepare a simple cocktail with purposeful intention.

"This is a horse feather", she said with a hint of pride as she served it to me.

One sip of the smooth and refreshing drink was all that it took to sooth away the harshness of the hot day.

"You do know me", I said.

Glancing at the happy hour menu, I took note that this was not the typical bar fare and ordered the carpaccio and roast quail.

The carpaccio was prepared just like in I've had in California wine country, with lovely slices of Parmesan and flavorful vinaigrette complementing the thinly sliced beef.

The roast quail was prepared with a spicy dry rub and baked. I enjoyed that tasty little bird.

I only savored Bastas bar for one, short, happy hour, but it was an entertaining hour at that.

People Love Themselves on Yelp, volume 3

2009-10-17T10:26:00.001-07:00

Had few complaints about diners from last night's shift, except a group of Westlake Chodes sitting in the bar who complained that the Caesar had anchovies (amazing white anchovies, see this post for how I will use them for world domination), then sent the ribeye back to be murdered to a helpless medium-well, then loudly bitched that restaurants that only serve wine and beer are "fucking cheap."

Go back to Bikinis, you tasteless chodes. Try not to date rape anyone on your way.

So onto the Yelpers whose tyranny continues to give me angina:

I wish I had known the Aloo Gobi was going to be spicy.

I'm just now getting into Indian food, so I might not be the best judge, but this place is freakin fantastic!!

My wife and I had num nums here on Saturday after seeing a show at the Civic. (that's a bit personal, don't you think?)

So at work I'm known as the Yelp girl. People come to me all the time asking for restaurant recommendations for this or that. (two guesses: 1) they're trying to get in your pants - no one thinks yelpers have the slightest clue what they're talking about or 2) you work from home)

"Her blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself..." Louis, Interview with the Vampire (Somewhere, a Hot Topic is missing its resident "Creepy guy")

People Love Themselves on Yelp, volume 2

2009-10-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

Here are today's winners:

The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is because it gets so darn crowded!! Which means, it's good.
I don't know what kind of coffee they use, but it's fine by me and served professionally. I'm not a crepe expert, but they seem fine also.

Well, restaurants like this are a dime a dozen in France.

Catch of the day:

Well , I'm French , and I don't take this kind of fake french cuisine . Never heard about "shrimps a la Bourguignone" There is no shrimp in Bourgogne (true) . Who wants to eat chicken a la Francaise .....Or a confit Duck , that's from Perigord ( I'm with you so far pal, but that's in France.)
A Bouchon is a very tiny restaurant in the town of Lyon , the best chefs in the world are from Lyon . The food is based on boudin, grattons ,andouillette,onglet aux echalottes , mushrooms ,St Marcellin , NOTHING PASTEURIZED !!!! got he picture ? It's the best and the worst of French Cuisine .(record screeching noise)
The wine is from Cotes du Rhone , and it was GOOD !!! That's the only thing I'll remember .The best cotes du Rhone is St Julien .... just try to find it ,,,,,,
Also the waitress , she had a bad bang , and too much friendly , like Dude , grabbing my shoulder , ,,,,No big deal when you are in France , and alone , my girlfriend didn't like her......

And scene.

People Love themselves on Yelp, volume 1

2009-10-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

In the sort of turn of events that makes gods and Russians laugh, I, who am famous in my small world for despising Yelpers and belittling them at every possible opportunity, now must routinely peruse their banal dribble as part of my non-serving job. To try and leech some of the cancer-causing bile my blood is accumulating over having to read screechingly moronic and wrong information, advice, and opining, here is a new series I've named after a t-shirt I desperately wanted to make (we've all been there):
People Love themselves on Yelp

Today's batch needs little in the way of my own commentary. It's sheer poetry
(rampant and psychotic misuse of English language kept as is):

There is nothing worse than a server saying "let me go check with the kitchen." That is absurd their job is to know what they are serving...

I am a complete foodie

There was an Indian couple sitting next to me (or close enough, right? -emc)

As a French onion soup connoisseur I found sadly that Serrato's soup was so salty it just plain sucked.

I'm from LA so I know good sushi from OK sushi.

I think my real problem is that coming from Hawaii I'd eaten so much amazing sushi that it's hard to be impressed.

Being from L.A. and having visited Japan, my standards are pretty high, but this place, is pretty much disappointing.

We've been to many of the best sushi restaurants in New York City, including Nobu, so...

Num-yummy!

That's all the time I have today. Join us next time for more b.s.-spewing on People Love themselves on Yelp, volume 2.

Week in Wankers

2009-08-22T09:58:00.001-07:00

Dear William Preston,

I got your name from your American Express Platinum card - the one you used to pay the bill for dinner for yourself and your friends the other night at our restaurant. I'd like to thank you all for coming, for being only slightly threatening when I told you we were dangerously low on heirloom tomatoes, and for making self-effacing jokes about how you would be my "nightmare table," which you followed up with a laugh that suggested you weren't totally joking.

In fact, you were all perfectly lovely. I enjoyed how easily and swiftly you chose your wines without asking for my help (someone's been reading their Wine Spectator!) and I loved hearing the sound of your laughter for the hour and a half after you paid out. It was the carefree, melodious laughter of the upper middle class, content in the knowledge that your Lexus SUV was right out the window where you could see it, that your gated community home was safe from harm, and that vigilant forces like Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly were at work against our evil Socialist (might we even suggest Nazi?) administration and their attempts to make us Sweden.

I particularly enjoyed the fist bump you gave me on your way out the door that said, Hey, we totally appreciated your awesome service to the point where it kind of feels like we're friends now! I half-expected to open the check presenter left on the table to find a "Great service" tacked on, as I often do whenever a guest leaves one of my tables so fulfilled that he's moved to physical contact.

But instead of such a comment, there was written: "Col. 3:23" on the credit card slip, just above the amount (over $400) and the tip ($50). Now, I admit, it is easier for me to figure out percentages in my head (12.5%) than it is for me to recall the latter half of the New Testament, so after consulting the internet, I learned that your message to me - at this point, now serving as an explanation for such an incredibly low tip - was this:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.
(NIV)

Thank you, William Preston, for those words of inspiration and guidance. Words that no doubt inspire you to wake up every morning and make your own money, which you then spend on nice (but not too nice) dinners with friends, which you then pay for, write off as a business expense, and then complain about our government taxing you to death.

I took a cue from you and wrote this Bible verse on the memo line of my rent check, but wouldn't you know it, that heathen landlady of mine just wouldn't accept less money, even though this month was pretty lean. I also tried it when paying for my dog's expensive medications, but the vet explained she doesn't work for men OR the Lord, she works for Terriers.

In trying to make sense of the generosity of your spirituality, Mr. Preston, but not of your wallet, I prayed. I prayed good and hard. I dug deep and silenced any anger I might have felt at your hypocrisy, any distress at the loss of what would have been $30-40 more (had you been anyone else), and any sadness I felt at how undermined the serving profession is in America - even at finer dining establishments like mine where the employees study wine and food passionately and make the every whim and desire of perfect strangers their priority 32-40 hours a week.

I set all these negative feelings aside and asked God to help me understand where you were coming from. Were you implying that instead of serving what I thought was a man, I was really serving the Lord? I admit I would never have guessed, given the table's obsession with discussing bisexuals and Catholics.

Or were you implying that service is its own reward? I thought, does this mean that I ought to be happy with the $2.13 per hour that I make and not be so greedy as to expect tips in excess of 15, 18, even 20 (!) percent? Are you, William Preston, with the American Express Platinum card content with the money you make?
The answer, I think, is simpler than all that.

You are just a giant turd.

Cheers,

Your Server

Week in Wankers

2009-06-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

Everyone was pretty well-behaved this last Friday night. I think it's because my new engagement ring is shaped like brass knuckles and could totally cut a bitch.

Oh, but there was this:

Guest: So this rosé is made with what again?

Me: Pinot Noir.

Guest: (Blank stare at glass full of salmon-colored rosé) So is it red?

Me: Pinot Noir is just the grape - it can be used in red, rosé, and Champagne. Champagnes are frequently made with it. The juice inside is white; it's the skins that are red.

Guest: Okay. So what do you call this?

Me: Rosé. Made from Pinot Noir. (It was actually Sinskey's very fine vin gris, but if I went into this, the poor guy's head would have rocketed off into space)

We've a long ways to go. I want to start by getting everyone to stop talking about varietals until they have a better grasp of wine.
It's gotten so bad that whenever someone sits down and says "I want a Pinot," I say, "No, you don't."

If you don't believe me, I give them a hot-climate Grenache/Syrah blend instead, and they love it.

How to Write Reviews Like a Complete Wanker: COMMANDMENT THREE

2009-05-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

When reviewing Chinese restaurants, if you cite your experience with any of the following, you are wasting everyone's time:
General Tso's anything
Sesame anything
Walnut and Honey Shrimp
Kung Pao

These dishes are about as Chinese as Howdy Doody. What's more, they're dead giveaways that your palate is probably so mucked up with sugar, salt, and corn starch, that I wouldn't trust you to tell me if I was about to bite into a steaming dog turd. I'll take my chances, thanks.

Ask for the Szechuan dishes, the Mandarin, the Cantonese...the real ones. The ones they aren't giving you on the white-folks menu. Ask for extra spicy. Ask for Lion's Head, oyster hot pots, ma po tofu. Soup dumplings! Demand soup dumplings! If more Americans raved about soup dumplings the way they do about General Tso's Heinous Ass Buffet, we wouldn't have to go to effing New York City to find one.

Tripe. Sea cucumber intestine. Scallop poop - whatever sounds weird, get it.
Seriously, people. There's a reason whole nations eat these things.

If Weight Watchers makes a frozen dinner of it, don't ever ever ever waste the world's time reviewing it for a restaurant.

How to Write Reviews Like a Complete Wanker: COMMANDMENT TWO

2009-05-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

Thou shalt not use the term "yummy." Are you fucking five???

Eat like a man

2009-05-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

My friend and editor, Robin Goldstein, went to Spain to engage in the debate about molecular gastronomy swallowing the Top Restaurants lists (of course, these lists come from places like the UK and the US, where began the phenomenon of "Famous for Being Famous").

Molecular gastronomy is like David Foster Wallace; I'm a big fan, and I appreciate the interesting, and sometimes even emotional, effects his often-experimental literature yields, but I would kill myself if every good author were doing it. It’s writing ahead of the reader. It's writing for other writers. I never get lost in one of his excellent stories.

I’d like to eat at El Bullí just to see if it makes me as horny as garlic-bomb southern Italian food does. Something tells me it won’t.

When a certain praised-and-praiseworthy restaurant I worked for not too long ago announced they were going to start using xantham gum in certain sauces and desserts, we all felt our dignity was going down the tubes. All the servers associated this substance with Hostess, Little Debbie, Taco Bell. Little did we know or understand that other celebrated kitchens were doing it, and that's—THAT'S–what our guys saw. Not that this totally harmless binding agent was an ingredient often made fun of in mass produced, processed foods, but that it was a permission to use a shortcut—a permission granted by the molecular gastronomy wizards by virtue of all the incredible attention they were receiving. Not only were we ALLOWED to use xantham gum and still be credible, we HAD to if we wanted to stay cutting edge.

It's true, the use of xantham never came up with guests ("What is that delicious flavor I'm tasting!" Hardly.), and I don't even know what it allowed our talented chefs to do that they couldn't before...

Or this: I've seen virtually everything you can imagine turned into a gelatinous ball, thanks to a simple agar solution. Carrots, basil, lychee...I bet you could turn the Brooklyn Bridge into pearls by boiling it down and dropping it in agar.
I bet it would taste pretty awful. But hey, you're eating it: Twitter the world!

Remember when you went to Universal Studios and got the DOTS ice cream, the ICE CREAM OF THE FUTURE? You thought, Wooo, they're dots of cream that melt in your mouth. Crazy! But at the end of the day, you wanted to lick dripping cold ice cream of your fucking hands and then gobble down the cone. And why? Because it engages everything to do so: frustration, panic, joy, sensuality, crunch, slurp, sweet, the salt of your own skin. And at the end you had celebrated a distinctly human tradition.

I never see DOTS anywhere but amusement parks; it is always the empty, lone booth that we walk past and snigger, jerking our thumbs and saying "Remember when we tried that?"

How to Write Reviews Like a Complete Wanker: COMMANDMENT ONE

2009-04-15T13:55:00.001-07:00

Since taking on a full time job as an editor of restaurant reviews, the focus of my seething ire has shifted from the dining crowd to the writing crowd; namely, the food writing crowd.
Everyone's a fucking food writer now! Thanks, Yelp!

Hear that noise? I just cracked a tooth snarling so hard. Now I whistle all my esses.

Following are some things I, as an editor, have come to despise - nay! - DETEST WITH A PASSION NORMALLY RESERVED FOR TEXAS REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS - in amateur food writing.

Bloggers! Take this to heart and your dreams of finally being noticed by a respectable publication will come to fruition, because right now (and trust me on this), no one can stand you. I want to help. Please, GOD, let me help...

WRITING COMMANDMENT #1:

DO NOT start your review with "Nestled in a...." Every time a description of a restaurant begins with the passive and clichéd "Nestled in a...." I tear the wings off a butterfly. Do you want to be the reason why all these beautiful creatures suffer so? Of course not. Knock it off.

Suggested alternatives: Get laid, have a drink, watch something funny and read some Anthony Bourdain, MFK Fisher, Frank Bruni even!! You are beginning this way because you are too rigid and locked in to a formula. Free associate instead. Think about what the restaurant means to you as a whole, and the conceit of its appearance. Think about the bigger picture. Riff on stuff around it, the crowd. If all else fails, just use. A different. Goddamned. WORD. It's not a fucking doe. It's a sushi bar. It doesn't "nestle."

MORE COMMANDMENTS TO FOLLOW. I NEED TO SMOKE A JOINT.

Week in Wankers

2009-04-11T12:04:00.001-07:00

Last Week in Wankers post was a bold-faced lie. It was actually a Week in Wankers from several months ago, but I never posted it because I was recovering from the grave wound I incurred when I shot myself in the face in frustration. Then I got the new job and, well you know, bitching about the dining scene took a backseat to professionally bitching about the dining scene.

I enjoyed my first shift back at the restaurant in two weeks, and enjoyed it even more because it would be another week before I have to do it again. In all fairness, I love the restaurant, love its heart, love my coworkers, and that love sort of disgustingly carries over like sewer run-off in a big storm to my guests, who eat and drink whatever I tell them is good, and so satisfy my egomaniacal need for validation. However, there are, as always, Wankers. And this was their week:

1. Another server (who seems to be chronically blessed with encountering the highest number of douchebags of any of us) had someone return a steak they ordered "rare." The complaint? TOO rare. Too rare. TOO rare. TOO RARE. I would like to take this moment to assure all skeptics out there that we did not, in fact, slap a raw ribeye on a plate and holler "Eat up!" Our grill cooks are from Texas, for the love of GOD, TEXAS! This means they can be executed for not knowing how to grill a steak to temperature. This is the subject for another post, to be called A Note About Temperature, or Why Americans Insist on Throwing $45 Down the Toilet.

2. Most people are TERRIFIED of wine. So much that the wine list trembles in their hands, and they spit words at me with panicky desperation, words they read someplace but don't understad like, "RED! SMOKY! UH, UH...DRY!!" So eager are they to relinquish the decision to me--and yet still look like they are the ones making a choice--that they agree to whatever the first thing out of my mouth is. I could say "Well, this wine isn't smoky, but it DOES have that shitty smell you associate with cleaning out a moldy fish tank" and they'll go "Yeah, that one!!"

This explains the astronomical success of Wine Speculator and Robert Parker's "scoring". DESPERATION! It's. Just. Wine. In Spain, they bathe in it. In France, they drink it from gasoline cans. Americans are like horny, insecure teenagers at a school dance when it comes to wine.

3. When you order our Caesar salad without its three housemade croutons, and without its 2 fillets of white anchovies, you are paying $10 for a side salad of Romaine hearts tossed in Caesar dressing, and are an idiot. Oh, and I eat your delicious white anchovy fillets in the back and fill up on brain-enriching Omega-3 fatty acids so that I and my offspring will take over the world and put you and your dumb offspring in cages hung from the ceiling, and poke you with bones.

4. Someone ordered a bacon risotto, which comes with a giant SLAB of house-made bacon OH MY GOD YUM on top of it. When it arrived, he picked the bacon up with his fingers, plopped it on a plate and announced to the server, "You can take that. I'm not a big bacon guy."
Said the not-a-big-bacon-guy. Said the not-a-big-bacon-guy who ordered the bacon risotto.

Week in Wankers

2009-04-08T19:06:00.001-07:00

"This wine list is expensive. I just want a good merlot for under $20."

Bobo. Come on. Think back to a time when you found a merlot for under $20. It was an something like an aisle, wasn't it? With other products for sale around you? Yeah, we call that a store.

Restaurants buy wine at a wholesale price, just like stores do. Both places, in order to make any profit, have to sell that wine to the public at a higher cost. Since restaurants (theoretically) move less of the product than a retail store will (add to that the greater cost of running a restaurant versus a retail shop: paying the servers who open it, serving it in glassware we bought and have to pay dishwashers and a water bill to wash), and you end up with pricing that looks like this:
$15 wholesale cost of a bottle --> $22-25 retail (at a steal)
$32-36 on a restaurant wine list

That means, in order to find a $20 merlot at a restaurant, that piece of shit has to run about $8 wholesale. If you would pick up said piece of shit in a store, it would be about $13.

Your friends hate you for bringing cheap, shitty wine to their dinner parties, by the way.

2. Then there's the loudmouthed frat boy fresh out of his MBA program who interrupts me as I'm describing the food and wine on the menus to make embarrassingly erroneous claims such as:

hanger steak is right here, where the flank is (pats my side - no seriously, the douchebag touches me. If this were a strip club, the little bastard would have two fingers broken before being tossed onto the street.)
we didn't like this Cote du Rhone-Villages. Do you have any just Cote du Rhone? That's like saying "Fuck this Cadillac, do you have a GM?" Moron.
(after I describe another Rhone as being kind of stinky, barnyardy goodness and his friends ask what that means exactly) Oh, lots of wine people describe wines as being stinky, it's like cow poop, you know? (Jesus, I hope you're not an MBA now that I hear you try to sales pitch your tablemates)

3. Another server had some name-dropping nitwit going "blah blah Sea Smoke blah blah Kistler...I never buy anything less than $50 retail."
His girlfriend looks at the rest of the table and says "Can you believe he's only known about wine for three months?"

Really. That long?

Alice Feiring

2009-03-23T08:36:00.001-07:00

This has nothing to do with waitressing and a whole lot to do with wine writers. Specifically, self-serving, self-obsessed, self-congratulatory wine writers named Alice Feiring.

It's funny, this love/hate thing I have with Alice. We see totally eye-to-eye in our almost psychotic hatred and fear of the New World, in our edict that small and rustic is never small and rustic enough, and in our overwhelming preference to drink something really weird and not necessarily tasty, over something that is ordinary but goes down easily.

In other words, if I were going to share a bottle of the spiky, peppered-bramble juice that is Pineau d'Aunis, it would be with her.

But between her outrageously self-important book, How I Saved the World From Parkerization (she didn't), and this month's article in Saveur (specifically where she implicates herself in Il Buco's decision to place teeny Sagrantino producer Ruggeri on its wine list), I am very, very scared for Alice.

This woman is going to float off into the stratosphere with that enormous head of hers!

She's the egomaniacal Hindenburg, perhaps having passed even Donald Trump and half the Real Housewives of the OC on her ascent to sociopathy. Someone needs to load her down with more weight, say a reality check.

I propose that Alice shadow me on a Saturday night at my restaurant, enduring plaintive moans about there being no California on the list, or smart-ass retorts to my speech about our localvore menu such as "Well, then where's the Texas wine?" (Oh, please Jesus, let that just be a smart-ass retort and not an actual request.) I bet after a night of explaining that Cahors is where Malbec originated, not Argentina, and that it won't be anything like the tarry, oaky fruitbomb they know from the grocery store Mendozas, Alice will tear her own hair out and throw her hands up. There's a long long way to go, sister. You didn't save the world from anyone yet. You're a little less FDR and a little more Obama-first-90-days. Sure you want the job?

I appreciate that she keeps trying. And if there's a clown on our side vying for a drop in the dunk tank, so much the better. After all, we can't always hate on Robert Parker alone. That's shooting fish in a barrel.

So, thanks, Alice, for offering yourself up to some entertaining obloquy with your unparalleled claims to being the übergeek that will deliver us all from the tyranny of Wine Speculator and the populace's love of mass-produced, boring, hyper-regulated juice. You're kind of like the Bill Maher of wine. I appreciate you both, but you kind of embarrass the team sometimes.

Love the wine in yourself; not yourself in the wine.

Clocking Out ... A Little Bit

2009-03-04T16:07:00.000-08:00

I have reached that critical juncture in every waitress's life where she must take a look at her non-committal job (and all the leisure time it buys her to gaze at birds, indulge her blog with entry after entry about hating Yelpers, and occasionally submit a short story to a contest she knows she won't win) and decide to step back onto the dance floor.
Yes, friends, I now have what is called in restaurant parlance A real job.

Fear not, I begged to keep one shift a week, so I can stay in touch with the insane battlefield between diners and themselves, diners and servers, servers and themselves, and back of house versus front of house. Plus, it's cash in hand, which rules. Think babysitting, but with more French words.

In the meantime, my full-time job has me editing and writing a shit ton (thank you, Jesus) more so I will either become better disciplined at blogging or (more likely, since this has happened before) say, "Eff it. It's happy hour."

Oh my gosh, I actually work from home. It's my dream come true! I can stock the bar and have cocktail hour with my man when he gets home, or with friends who have real jobs, too! I can go to yoga!

How long do you give me before this wears off and I'm bitching about how much I miss waitressing full time?

Reviewers who suck

2009-02-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a ton of research on Washington DC restaurants so I can more effectively edit some reviews for a forthcoming guide (I don't live there, so I rely heavily on the community of diners eager to blab - luckily, there's plenty). In the process, I have learned the following:

1. Washington Post.com restaurant critic Tom Sietsema likes everything (especially being recognized and then mentioning it in his reviews). He's less critical about food and wine than the bum in the park across from my house is about the government.

2. Yelpers are drooling idiots who boringly blab on about service in a way that makes them obviously not into the dining experience so much as having their collective dicks sucked by a waiter. No dick suckage? Bad review! Oh, was there food? We didn't notice.

3. For this reason, Yelp is notorious for having reviews so mixed that the site is completely obsolete. I find I prefer eGullet, much to my surprise (I wasn't expecting to like any of them). These people take the whole thing into consideration, and actually seem to have eaten outside of their homes once or twice. Rarely do you hear anyone say something retarded like "$20 seems very expensive for an entree, but whatever." Have you been in a bomb shelter since 1962?? Jesus, I hate Yelpers.

4. Chowhounders do nothing but ask other Chowhounders if they've been someplace yet. Seriously. Google a restaurant right now and see if that isn't the first 3 results that come up: "Has anyone been to _____ yet?" Useless.

5. The people that leave comments under Tom Sietsema's Washington Post reviews usually sound like they're writing from prison. Is it possible to be this zealous and stupid without stabbing yourself in the throat every time you brush your teeth? One exclamation point will do, thank you!!!!!

6. Frommer's: since when do people get paid to merely list what the menu offers? A critical opinion wouldn't kill you, you know.

7. On any menu, syrupy martinis with cutesy names are the bellwether to a terrible wine list. It's like how seagulls precede a storm. Or a school of dolphin. Which is it? Who cares, so long as it's not fucking Bogle.

8. Yelp reviews sound they're written by Baby Jane if she were let out of the asylum for a nice meal. I'm only this angry because a half dozen of the damned things pop up whenever I Google a restaurant. Can I change my preferences or put an obscene-content lock on that site or something?

9. This goes for everyone, on every site, blog, forum, etc: If I see one more person use "yummy" as a descriptor, I'm going to pay my hacker friends to send a virus to the site that plays a video of blue-footed boobies doing their silly mating dance, over and over again. I imagine some person with severe emotional retardation, petting their My Little Pony at the table, lovingly "feeding" it whatever they are eating. "See, Snowflake? Isn't this pork belly yummy? Let's go online and tell everyone!"

The Culinary Wasteland That Is The Texas Coast

2009-02-12T08:32:00.001-08:00

I'm still here, fear not. I just took a few days to go camp out at the Gulf to see these guys. They're called Roseate Spoonbills and they are so marvelously ugly it's beautiful. There's a French word for that, I think.

We ate crawfish tails (I finally sucked out the brains - creamy and sweet! Now I know why Zombies are so mad for 'em), thick-shelled oysters that tasted not unpleasantly like harbor (cocktail sauce fine on Gulf oysters; ask me for some with your Duxburys and I will throw you out of the restaurant myself), and fried snapper (note to Fulton Beach, TX: Panko is a specific type of bread crumb, air-dried in the walls and of a certain delicate crispness - it's not a method of cooking, so you can't call it "panko-fried" if you rolled it in those Italian seasoned bread crumbs from the can... and I know you did.)
But our most charming meal was in the overweight-elderly capitol of the world: Port Aransas. It's a little Italian restaurant called Venetian Hotplate that, while serving Americanized conceits like tortelloni with ham and peas in a Parmesan cream sauce, does so with balance and tasty fresh herbs - and with menu items listed in Italian (usually a trustworthy cue). The glass list is, as expected, a teeny parking lot full of SUVs like La Crema, but the bottle selection has a few small-production pearls on it from the Boot.

Most of VH's success owes to its disarming preciousness - pots of flowers and garden tcotchkes out front, seashell-folded linen napkins on plates, a vaguely double-wide feeling to the structure. You simply don't feel critical here - it's like dining in someone's darkened living room - and this makes everything taste better, allows for some pleasure in the minutaie. And there's this sort of hilarious Renn Faire-Girl music quietly playing, like Enigma and Lorena McKennitt.

Anyway, here it is. If you're down that way, you're probably dying for some decent food.
Anything the Texas coast offers, Mexico and Louisiana are doing better. Please, tell me if I'm wrong, because we plan to go back in summer to see the spoonbills mate. Apparently, they offer each other straw and twigs with their enormous flat beaks. I can think of nothing in the world I want to see more.

A Tuscan Parable

2009-01-30T10:31:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time in Tuscany, a winemaker learned that a large number of his wines were being sold in a peculiar, much overlooked part of the United States. The middle of Texas, of all places! Intrigued by this far away land and its people - who so obviously enjoyed his wines - he set off for a visit.
With two compatriots, he visited the restaurant in Texas that was responsible for the bulk of his sales. They sat in a quiet booth in the back and sampled some other bottles on the wine list from reputable Tuscan producers. They feasted, and racked up a bill over $400.

The winemaker paid. He left $40 as a tip for his server.

Just under 10%. For excellent service.

The winemaker didn't seem to realize that the reason his wine was selling so well was not because of the importer who brought it to the States, nor the distributor who picked it up, nor the sales rep who brought it to the restaurant's wine buyer, nor the wine buyer for putting it on the list.

The wine sold as well as it did because the servers liked it, thought it was a great deal for such a well-made wine, and emphasized it to their guests. The people largely responsible for his success were the very people he had slighted. The servers, thereafter, boycotted his wine and the winemaker saw a dramatic dip in his sales. Had he never left Italy to investigate, this might never have happened.

The moral of the story is: Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Oh, no wait.... it's LEARN TO TIP, PAISAN!

Sulfites: The New Carbs

2009-01-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

Every so often, a "medical fact" rides in on a wave of paranoia and shoddy research. It reaches a screaming crescendo that one can measure by how many bestsellers are trotted out on the subject, and then, after a few years of no real change in anyone's quality of life, the wave rolls back out to the sea of misinformation where it will swell again with a new generation that doesn't realize we've all been there, done that and it failed miserably.

Atkins comes to mind. So does invading a foreign country.

Now this! The rampant self-diagnosed "allergy to sulfites". Correction: not self-diagnosed. Someone on the internet told you their mother has it, too, so it's a communal diagnosis.

I'm not saying there aren't many people out there who have bizarre (and varying) reactions to different alcoholic beverages.

I'm not saying you haven't figured out what makes you feel worse and what makes you feel better, and therefore created a rational list of Things to Avoid.

I'm saying lots and lots of people are still grasping at straws. And I want to help you narrow it down.

Next time you ask me if any of our wines don't have sulfites cause you're allergic to them, I would ask you if you've eaten any dried fruit lately. Or deli meat. Or nuts. Or anything that has been packaged. Sulfites are a preservative found in EVERYTHING. You wouldn't want to drink a wine without sulfites. It would be a bunch of rotted, moldy grape juice.

To diagnose your unique problem, don't ask anyone on the internet if they have similar symptoms. The internet is a wasteland of screaming ignorance. (Irony alert!)

But here's a recap of the Scientific Method we all learned in high school:

1. Observation through experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Look for previous explanations (i.e. are you throwing up and headachy? you might have drunk too much, or have a problem metabolizing alcohol. If you are having symptoms you've had before with things you are allergic to, you are, naturally, allergic to this as well.).
If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.

2. Form a Hypothesis: Try to state an explanation ("When I drink red wine I feel rotten in ways I haven't felt otherwise or before; therefore I must have some weird reaction to something in red wine.").
: 3. Conclude Something: If you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow? ("Red wine contains sulfites, therefore I might be reacting to sulfites")
THIS IS WHERE MOST PEOPLE STOP AND MAKE AN ASSUMPTION. LOGICAL FALLACIES ABOUND, EINSTEIN WEEPS, AND YOU ARE NO CLOSER TO THE TRUTH.: 4. Test Conclusion: Look for the opposite of each consequence in order to disprove 2. (Drink white wine, sparkling wine, beer; eat fruits with sulfites in them - if you still feel rotten, 3 may be correct; if not, forget the sulfites thing and think about what else goes into red wine that white wine doesn't share. Contact with grape skins. Skins contain tannins. So revise 3 as "I might be reacting to tannins." Now test by drinking tea, coffee, grape juice. And so on.)

Many of mankind's troubles stem from trying to PROVE our theories rather than disprove them. Religion, paranoia, conspiracy theory - anything that eschews science, the devotion to truth via the process of elimination - relies on proving what you already believe to be true. It is about as far from truth, then, as one can get.

Where WERE You?

2009-01-20T20:30:00.000-08:00

I envisioned a night of pouring champagne all over myself and my guests and serving up a billion Hope sandwiches, but the only people who came to dine tonight were a few poopy pantses who didn't mention President Oh-hell-yes once!

Losers.

I had two tables.

The terrorists won tonight.

Missed Connections

2009-01-18T15:53:00.000-08:00

Dear Blow-Hard at 61, Saturday night:

Your guests would certainly rather order a drink from me than listen to you recount endless tales of your investment property woes, but since you won't shut up every time I'm near the table, even if I linger uncomfortably for several seconds, they can't. Bet this is why you "never see them anymore." Can't wait to see who you bring in next time to bore to a sober death!

Dear Guy at Large Party, All of Whom Ordered Coffee:

Half caf, half decaf?
.... Really?

Dear Dumb Girl With Her Rich Parents,

When I opened your white wine and did that little banter about it being too cold right now but with a little warming up, it would be beautiful and have all these crazy aromas, and then you immediately asked for ice as if you hadn't heard a word I'd said, it made me realize why your first three husbands will leave you. Miss yer guts!

Dear "Food Writer" for Free Local Magazine Your Daddy Gave You Money to Start,

Every time you begin a paragraph with subject-verb disagreement, it makes me smile. Good thing it's every single fucking time! I also really enjoy your 2nd grade command of words, such as ...pastas paired with expertise sauces. Whee! Journalism is fun! Maybe next you can be president.

When I Love This Job

2009-01-17T12:09:00.001-08:00

I do love my job, by the way. It may be hard to tell, the way I go on, but it's like being a Red Cross worker: they may want to rend the skin from their cheeks sometimes because of what they see, but they are ultimately fulfilled.

For those of you keeping score, I just compared myself - a waitress - with a Red Cross worker. Does the tyranny of hyperbole ever end?

Okay, ask any high school teacher: it's the small victories. Last night, I waited on a couple, about my age, dressed nicely. Dressed in the attitude of respect for dining out. He in a dinner jacket, she in a gauzy shawl. No desperate cleavage, no gaudy fashion statements (though I'm a fan of both, for entertainment's sake).

They looked at me when I introduced myself. Do you know how rare that is?
As I went over the menu with them, they ooh'd and aah'd in the right places. They excitedly accepted my offer for an aperitif.

America! Drink your aperitifs! It loosens you up - which, believe me, you need.

Then the guy said something that will forever endear him to me. He said, "My experience is with California wines; I know little about the ones on your list. Can you help me?"

Such a simple thing, humility.

I'd love to, I said, and asked him what California wines they like, then I found him old world wines that would be a different experience, but up their alley.
I gave them a taste of a Corbieres we have by the glass - a stinky heavyweight boxer with a one-two jab of blackberry jam and horse sweat. They liked it but weren't quite sold, so I told them we had a Bandol that would make the night memorable. The Corbieres, I told them, is Hugh Grant - a decent actor, nice to look at, and entertaining enough; the Bandol is Sir John Gielgud.
They ordered the Bandol, bottle and all, without asking for a taste first (which would have been impossible anyway).

They loved it, keeping their noses in the glasses and lighting up with recognition at certain smells, memories. When they got their food, they were silent as they took their first few bites. Reverent. Feeling it, weighing it, knowing they were, right then, being changed just a little bit. They extended their hands across the table to each other with a bite of their own dish in each, and shared. These are people who live, you know? They don't grimace and conjecture and dissect the experience and scribble it on a $7.99 memo pad they purchased at Target when they joined Yelp. These are people who think and feel in equal proportion, you can tell.

The world has made easy choices of war, and has become comfortable with poverty and despair. Awareness, without contempt, is hard. It is rare. I envy it; every moment of my life I struggle for it. It is not what makes up the majority and it is not whose voices are heard and it is not the bright green light of televised victory when leaders choose to send missiles to schoolyards and villages - it is instead the small and silent glow of consideration. That this cynical girl can still find it - in a restaurant! - even just once every few nights, means the world to me.

Too.... Angry. Need..... Puppies!

2009-01-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

The Week in Wankers

2009-01-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

There was this couple griping in German about the hostess; their server happened to speak and understand German. She held her tongue until they'd ordered, received their meal and were halfway through it, then asked - in perfect German - if it was good.

Ah, sweet Demütigung!

A nice old lady asked me for a bottle of "the Tuscan Chardonnay", a roasted chestnutty little thing by Felsina, one of the most respected producers in Tuscany. Then she asked me "Is it DRYYYYY?" (See Catastrophic Post-Modernist Nightmare) I asked her what she usually likes to drink. She said, "I hate to admit it, but Yellowtail."
"Trust me. You'll love this. It's infinitely more interesting, layered and subtle than that butterball."
"Fine," she said. "And could you bring a glass of ice with it?"

Later, her trashy little granddaughter showed up, in fake tan and stiletto boots, all of 21, 22. She loudly proclaimed to her grandmother that she ought to try one of her mussels. The grandmother said, "What are they like?"
"They're just like oysters," the girl replied loudly, obviously pleased with herself. "They taste like slimy fish."
Wrong three different ways in one breath. Most impressive.

A late table came in, about five minutes before closing. She was already drunk. He was enabling. She announced, with a boredom that still managed to sound zealous, that she used to run a wine bar. Then she slurred, "I don't like sweet. Nothing sweet."
(See For the Love of GAWD, people, stop saying you hate sweet wine cause you don't and you shouldn't anyway but it doesn't matter cause you DON'T...)
I described a Salice Salentino to her as a lush and juicy blueberry with peppery wood tannins and nice acidity to balance the fruit, and she said "Hellloo? I told you I don't like 'sweet'."
It took me a second to realize she meant the reference to blueberries.
"It's not a Jolly Rancher," I said. "But it is made from fruit, so..."

Ran a wine bar, my ass. More like ran BY a wine bar.
Once.
In Borneo.

"What does brown butter ice cream taste like?"
"And the creme fraiche?"

My favorite exchange of the week, though, was courtesy of my coworker, C___, whose deadpan deliveries are the kind of genetic superpower I might have had if I weren't conceived on hallucinogens.
After scanning the very short dessert menu for some time, a lady looked up at C____ and said,
"I like chocolate ice cream, what do you suggest?"
"Amy's," he answered, referring to our local ice cream chain.

Guess you had to be there.

Something stinks around here...

2009-01-09T12:32:00.001-08:00

And it isn't the food.

It's Patchouli. Sandalwood. Estee Lauder. Dior.
It's any number of the perfumes being peddled by Britney Spears, Beyoncee, Mariah Carey. It's cheap Bath and Body Works Pear Body Spray.

Guys, when you pay $60 for a Brunello, but all you smell is your date's Red Door by Arden, doesn't it make you the slightest bit ... resentful?
Friends of these women, when a dish of pork braised for five hours in sage, tomatoes and cinnamon is completely obliterated by your elbowmate's Fantasia (and girlfriend pours it on, doesn't she?), aren't you thinking you might as well have saved $50 and gone to Taco Bell instead?

And let's not forget the three tables in a twenty-foot radius whose wine glasses are filling with the spirits of Saks Fifth Avenue! It's an olfactory epidemic!

You could certainly drop a hint in a way that won't get you into trouble - may even get you laid - and will allow you and your fellow diners to enjoy the food you got all dressed up and paid for:

"Baby, I love your natural smell. It makes me crazy! The only thing that makes me want you more than your freshly showered smell, is a nose full of Brunello and garlic. Let us go, unadorned as we are now, to dine!"

For the love of all that is holy, women, don't wear perfume to restaurants. We want to smell the food and the wine, not you. I guarantee that your man, unless an oblivous oaf, feels the same way, and he is working up a way to either tell you or cheat on you with someone who smells less like an Avon lady.

P.S. A shout out to my little sistas under 25: When you do wear perfume, spritz once into the air and step through the delicate shower lingering there. Subtle is Sexy. Where are your mothers? It's like an Aesthetic Lord of the Flies, twenty-somethings running around with identical loose dresses and 11" heels, drenching yourselves in perfume that smells 100x stronger to us than it does to you. Take the conch and spread the word!

Positive affirmation

2009-01-02T10:05:00.001-08:00

Each shift I work is a new opportunity to practice patience with my guests; to provide stellar service that is both personal and professional; to describe food and wine in sensual and visceral ways, even to a table of drooling birdbrains; and to enjoy watching people embarrass themselves in ways I will later relay to this journal.

Happy 2009, Person Who Reads This Blog!

Almost Totally Unrelated to Dining Out

2008-12-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Yahoo Answers is almost as worthless as Yelp and Chowhound in interweb realm of Populist Advice. Seemingly peopled with a concentrate of drooling morons, the threads that attempt to answer Yahoo users' questions -- subjects include diagnosing strange physical symptoms, ingredients in certain recipes, taking legal action against landlords, etc -- are riddled with grammatical errors, logical fallacies and off-subject rants. The best answers are blatantly copied and pasted from other websites. I once read a question about drug interactions whose three out of four answers were encyclopedia entries taken from drugs.com. The fourth was a sentence of shorthand drivel so incomprehensible I can't even repeat it here. None of the answers actually addressed the question at all.

Further, just like with equally unreliable websites Yelp and Chowhound, you can rate an answer's helpfulness on a scale of 5 stars. Ratings seem to attract a subset of internet users with too much free time who also require constant validation. I have tracked a few users who leave detailed (one might say superfluously detailed) answers on a wide range of issues from medical to philosophical to home and garden maintenance. They flitter like bees from question to question, dropping suspiciously well-researched answers and collecting 4-to-5-star ratings.

I like to imagine a manic midnight in a basement somewhere, 40-oz Mountain Dew sweating away on the table littered with opened encyclopedias as a lonely, frustrated person who commands no respect by daylight - perhaps a third-grade teacher? - furiously clicking away at facts and figures regarding scabies in pets, eco-safe termite extermination, and housing laws in the greater Milwaukee area, muttering Come on, five stars!

Just now, I Googled "getting rat urine smell out of oven" (for reasons completely unrelated to having rat urine smells in my oven. Swearsies.) and my first link was to a Yahoo Answers thread. The first answer was vaguely helpful, as the user suggested a solution of vinegar and water be placed near the smell to neutralize it, or an open carton of Arm & Hammer. Every response thereafter seemed to unravel farther from the question - a few alluding to pet odors; an apologetic sentiment that suggested the asker's rat problem came from a dead pet - until finally, the thread disintegrated utterly into an answer about training your pet rat to urinate in a litter box.

It's true that Wikipedia is tightly policed enough to ensure a higher rate of accuracy than many other reference sites on the internet. But even it is subject to the chaos of democracy. But if Wikipedia is a remarkably graceful attempt at egalitarian wisdom, Yahoo Answers reminds us that we are all equally incapable and in need of corked forks.

The catastrophic postmodernist nightmare that is the discussion of the wine list

2008-12-19T10:14:00.000-08:00

When was the last time communication was so bad between you and another person that it made your face actually come off, walk outside, and have a cigarette without you?

For me, it happens almost nightly.
Come on, how bad can it be?
Try this exchange, which really for super-cereal real happened, about a week ago (for the purposes of added insight, the female guest shall be known as Shiraz-Seeker):

Shiraz-Seeker: (perusing list with a distinct look of utter confusion because it has no Shiraz on it) I want a red wine but I don't like a real dry wine.

Me: When you say "dry", do you mean you don't want something that feels very tannic?

Shiraz-Seeker: No, I don't mind tannins....

Me: You just want there to be a lot of body and fruit with it.

Shiraz-Seeker: Well I don't want anything sweet.

Me: It wouldn't be sweet. We're just talking fruit - and it's kind of lush. It's a Priorat we have that's got a nice full mouth of red fruit and some pepper...

Shiraz-Seeker: Pepper? So is it real dry?

Me: (face detaching itself and walking outside while flipping the bird) Who knows.

I highlighted the words: dry, sweet, tannins, lush, body, fruit, because these are words most often bandied about in wine reviews and discussion. They, and several other extrinsically worthless words like "mid-palate" and "finish" make up what the mass populace thinks of as the Impenetrable Lexicon of Wine. These words will do nothing to help you understand wine if you don't already have some inkling of it - if you haven't thought about the way it feels and smells and tastes. The words only give some semblance of structure to this otherwise catastrophic postmodernist nightmare that is the discussion of the wine list.

In other words: don't use borrowed words to to shop for anything. It's like when you try to parrot your knowledgeable brother-in-law when you are at your mechanic's so they will think you know what you are talking about and should, therefore, NOT be swindled out of a lot of money. I've been horribly guilty of this very thing. ("It's better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." -- somebody smarter than I)

"Dry" to one person means a lot of tannins, which give your mouth the feeling of being pulled on or filled with tiny strands of wood. Think black tea.
"Dry" to someone else might mean a high alcohol content.
"Dry" to yet another person might mean, in white wine, a high natural acidity, which actually makes your mouth water, so is it dry or just wet-waiting-to-happen?

So next time you are at one of my tables, lost in the wilderness of names and varietals and vintages and regions, don't use these words. Just tell me some wines you usually like to drink that we don't have - or better yet, what you plan to eat - and then let me go from there. You describing what you want will yield no better results than if I just hurled glasses of different selections at you and let you choose by licking them off your shirt.

The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.
-- Kierkegaard

Oh, and here:

Warm Fuzzy Feelings!

2008-12-18T10:13:00.000-08:00

This blog has been angry. Sure, it makes for entertaining reading, but it also gets a little tiresome. Like Lewis Black, if he weren't nearly as funny.

I'm going to make this blog less angry rants about dining out and more about puppies.

Sweet wine won't hurt you

2008-12-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

I throw up in my mouth whenever someone orders a chocolate dessert with candied orange peels and ginger crystals and then says "I'll have another merlot." That's the gustatory equivalent of going to the Metropolitan Opera with your ipod on. There's a reason the wine list has dessert wines on it. If they DO order a dessert wine, most people go right for the Port (because that's all they know), though it may not be the best pairing. For a transcendessimal experience, try some of the following next time you go out:

Vin Santo de Chianti - a roasted-chestnutty angel in a glass with the kind of exciting hot syrup texture you remember from sneaking your grandma's apricot brandy by the fire. Works especially well with desserts featuring cheese, nuts, stone fruits, pineapple.

Moscato d'Asti - can be "ish", as most things produced in great quantity are, but in the right hands, it is a fresh and lively red apple number sparkling away on your tongue with black pepper notes. Very versatile - try with sorbets and panna cottas, vanillas, berries, custards and rich desserts. The acidity and bubbles will help reign in all that cloy.

Sauternes, or any botrycized equivalent thereof - Botrytis is a fungus that, in optimum conditions, shrivels the grape and concentrates all its sugars for some sweet-ass, complex wine. Look also for: Trockenbeerenauslese (Riesling), Lupiac (Sauv Blanc and Semillon, like Sauternes), Selecion de Grand Noble (Alsace). In a year where the crop sees noble rot (the desirable form of Botrytis), Chile's unbeatable Errazuriz (comprised of Sauv Blanc, Sauv Gris, and Viognier) makes a nice alternative to the pricier Bordeaulaises of Sauternes and Lupiac. The slight bit of funk from the rotted grapes is heaven with a foie gras, cheese and nuts, pears. Incidentally, the most expensive wines in the world include Chateau Y'Quiem, a Sauternes producer. Not that price is always a good indication of the ethereal, but in this case, the aristocracy is onto something.

Reccioto del Valpolicella - Not to be confused with Valpolicella, which is a dry wine. In Reccioto, they leave the Valpolicella grapes (usually the doo-wop trio Rondinella, Corvina and Molinara) on the vine to get all sugary, then lay them out on mats to dry. If you are having chocolate and want to try a red other than Port, get on this. It's similar to Port in its raisiny, dried fig thing, but it's not fortified with additional alcohol. Instead, it gets its braces from a natural acidity, which is like warming yourself on a cold winter's night by the fire, not on it.

When I Love My Job

2008-12-12T10:27:00.000-08:00

I do love my job, by the way. It may be hard to tell, the way I go on, but it's like being a Red Cross worker: they may want to rend the skin from their cheeks sometimes because of what they see, but they are ultimately fulfilled.

For those of you keeping score, I just compared myself - a waitress - with a Red Cross worker. Does the tyranny of hyperbole ever end?

Okay, ask any high school teacher: it's the small victories. Last night, I waited on a couple, about my age, dressed nicely. Dressed in the attitude of respect for dining out. He in a dinner jacket, she in a gauzy shawl. No desperate cleavage, no gaudy fashion statements (though I'm a fan of both, for entertainment's sake).

They looked at me when I introduced myself. Do you know how rare that is?
As I went over the menu with them, they ooh'd and aah'd in the right places. They excitedly accepted my offer for an aperitif.

America! Drink your aperitifs! It loosens you up - which, believe me, you need.

Then the guy said something to me that will forever endear him to me. He said, "My experience is with California wines; I know little about the ones on your list. Can you help me?"

Such a simple thing.

I'd love to, I said, and asked him what California wines they like, then I found him old world wines that would be a different experience, but up their alley.
I gave them a taste of a Corbieres we have by the glass - a stinky heavyweight boxer with a one-two jab of blackberry jam and horse sweat. They liked it but weren't quite sold, so I told them we had a Bandol that would make the night memorable. The Corbieres, I told them, is Hugh Grant - a decent actor, nice to look at, and entertaining enough; the Bandol is Sir John Gielgud.
They ordered the Bandol, bottle and all, without asking for a taste first (which would have been impossible anyway).

They loved it, keeping their noses in the glasses and lighting up with recognition at certain smells, memories. When they got their food, they were silent as they took their first few bites. Reverent. Feeling it, weighing it, knowing they were, right then, being changed just a little bit. They extended their hands across the table to each other with a bite of their own dish in each, and shared. These are people who live, you know? They don't grimace and conjecture and dissect the experience and scribble it on a $7.99 memo pad they purchased at Target when they joined Yelp. These are people who think and feel and consider, you can tell.

The world has made easy choices of war, and has become comfortable with poverty and despair. Awareness, without contempt, is hard. It is rare. I envy it; every moment of my life I struggle for it. It is not what makes up the majority and it is not whose voices are heard and it is not the bright green light of televised victory when leaders choose to send missiles to schoolyards and villages - it is instead the warm glow of thought and consideration. That this cynical old girl can still find it - in a restaurant! - even just once every few nights, means the world to me.

On Tipping

2008-12-05T12:48:00.001-08:00

Tipping For Imbeciles (and there are a surprising number of you out there - if not you, the people you are dining with. Please share this information with them next time you go out to eat):

18% is the universally-understood industry standard for service you really can't kvell about, but that certainly didn't detract from your experience. 18. Not 15. 15 is universally understood as cheap and ignorant, in finer dining places. Why should the type of restaurant make you tip more? We'll get to that.

20% is soooooo easy to figure out, it's painful. Move the decimal back one place and double it. Let's try a few practice runs:

$180 --> $36

$42 --> $8 (don't worry about small change)

$13 --> is this you and your fucking high school theater friends sharing a plate of cheese fries and some coffee for two and a half hours while singing show tunes and popping creamers open on your face like zits? Leave 100% Sometimes I think crappy tips are my comeuppance for my nightlife between the ages 15 & 17.

Verbal tippers will share a ring of hell with TV evangelists, CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, and orderlies who abuse their patients. Seriously, there is no more fundamentally malicious joke on earth like you going on and on about what a great server I was and asking for my name again and patting my manager on the back on the way out going "She was fantastic!" and then leaving me 15%. I appreciate the warm fuzzies and all, but I'll appreciate them even more in front of a warm radiator this winter, assface.

Okay, for those of you wondering why you should tip a server 20% or more - those holdouts from the Reagan years going, It's not my fault this dipshit chose to be a waiter - mainstream servers are generally divided into three strata:

Kids, stoners and slackers who just need enough money to travel to India in the Spring and smoke hash. They don't know shit about your food and they don't care. They work in vegetarian joints, chain restaurants, anyplace with happy hour advertisements in the back of your weekly paper. Fuck em. Tip em whatever you want, if the food doesn't kill you before the bill comes.

Students and young parents, trying to eke out a living while pursuing something that will better sustain them and their families. They may have found themselves in a difficult situation and are diligently working their way out of it in a job that affords them scheduling flexibility and the opportunity to control their income with picking up extra shifts or getting lucky. This is where you come in. They may not have terrific command of the spoken word, make you feel all terrific about your choice of the pork chop over the chicken, or be able to tell you where your chardonnay came from, but they care about their jobs and your experience. This is a basic service and should be rewarded justly. Everyone is trying to make it out there, these people gave you something with kindness and efficiency. In this day and age, that's rarer than you think.

The professional.Otherwise known as "lifers," this group is composed not entirely of people who have fallen hopelessly in love with the restaurant world, with great food and wine, with the rigors and excitement of throwing a party night after night, for strangers, and watching some of those strangers become regulars and friends. Some of these people may act like they don't love their job - may in fact be plotting their escape into rock stardom, film, journalism or stand-up comedy - but don't be fooled: they're hooked. They read the Wednesday edition of the Times, know who Ruth Reichl is, and care about how the food looks when the kitchen puts it on the expo line. They'll lovingly rub a wet cloth around the rim of your plate, they'll explain their favorite dishes on the menu to you as if you were their own mother and father out to eat with them, they'll insist you try a new wine because it's a revelation with the rabbit! These people try (and sometimes manage to) not just to serve you food, but enlighten you. They are forged over countless evenings with the ability to "read" you right away, and know if they should silently support whatever experience you wish to have, or show you a good time. These are people who do it for the love and pride - many have degrees, even advanced degrees, but they chose to be with you and your miserable ass tonight, and they might have even made you feel better. That is priceless. That is worth 30% and more. Still feeling fussy about that? Imagine a world in which the only servers - no matter how upscale, chef-driven and exciting the restaurant - are type #1, because no one else will stay in this profession if you all tipped negligently.

If you are going to tip poorly, dont take my pen. If you do take my pen, don't leave your shittier Kinko's-produced bic advertising your services as a real estate agent. If you think a waitress you just tipped 12% is in the market to buy or sell a house, I wouldn't trust you to find me an empty dumpster to sleep in, you dumb bitch. And another thing: I now know your work number. Your receptionist will be receiving a call with the results of your STD test sometime next week.

If you tip shitty because it's the holidays and you think your money is tight, go to Jack in the Box. Word has it, they don't expect tips, and therefore don't build their lives on them, so that 15% will really make their day, whereas I am just an unappreciative asshole who has people waiting for your table that know how to budget for a meal out in a nice restaurant. Face!

Sitting at the bar one night

2008-12-02T10:35:00.000-08:00

How you know you're sitting next to a couple on a first date:

She tells him, "I really only drink maybe 2, 3 glasses when I'm out with friends and even that's not very often. I'm a believer in moderation. After this, I'm going to work out, from about 9-10."
"After your mother's? Wow, that's commitment."
"I'm not afraid of commitment."
She’s saying, I’ve been hurt before. She's going to take it out on the next guy, whoever he happens to be.

Later, he is telling her, "Life insurance is an investment, really."

They ask for the check and the woman asks me if I enjoyed my soup.
"Oh yes," I say, "It was watercress and andouille sausage. Awesome."
"You looked like you were enjoying it."
I dab at my mouth with the side of my hand, just to be safe.

I tell her I think I recognize her.
"Do you go to U___?" I ask, referring to my late place of employment, a very trendy restaurant. Her long, middle-aged face is so familiar, despite the heavy black eyeliner she is wearing tonight. I know her horsey nose, her lantern jaw.
"I live in the neighborhood," she says, without answering my question. "Did you ride your bike?"
I nod, wondering if she watched me pull up, what she was thinking of me that made her need to come talk to me with her date present. In the world of women, this is a disarmament of sorts. You looked like you were enjoying it.

She introduces herself and her date.
"I own a company," she offers, "I go to people's houses and organize."
There's a weird beat.
"Well, God bless you!" I say, more to him than to her. They both laugh, but not so much she.
I do not see a second date. Maybe, but not a third.

Then the coworkers come. I surmise that the girl at the far end is British because the alpha-male, on the end closest to me, keeps shouting "Oi! Oi!" to her when she isn't paying attention. And he's definitely not British.
One of the girls asks, "Kevin, how's your love life?"
They've had too much to drink. This will either bond them or make things weird at work on Monday.
"I'm an Aquarian," he says. "Impossible to date."
The girl next to the Brit squeals. "I'm a Leo! We're supposed to be perfect together!"

Kevin begins to talk about being attracted to girls who are projects and the girls holler in harmony. "I know about projects!"
All women think they know about projects. This implies all men are projects. The truth is, all of us are projects. Some projects build our muscles and some tear them down. You have to know who you are to know which project to pick. I almost tell them this, but there's too much estrogen in the group as it is. We'll give Kevin a break.

The Brit, from the far end, asserts that she has found the man she is going to marry and Kevin waves his hands about, "Hello…!?! What?? That's awesome… I had no idea." He is too eager to hear about it. He is disappointed the Brit is in love, you can tell. "Tell me about this guy!"

He wants to hear the guy is just like him. Or worse than him. That way, he has a shot. Not just at her, but someone like her. He needs to know that someone like him would have a shot at someone like her.

She circumvents the rest of the girls at the bar to talk to him beside his chair, standing up. A girl will do this to talk to another person about the man she loves. Kevin does not vacate his own comfortable seat to go ask the Brit more closely about her man, this man she has found. He simply remains, waiting for nothing, not expecting her to come over and tell him, not even thinking about it, his strident demand of her is beyond answer, his look faraway even as she speaks right into his face about love.

Let go of high school and drink this motherfucking rosé

2008-12-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

Is it sweet?

She wrinkles her face. Her whole face. Like she’s really asking if it came out of a dog’s asshole. Is it sweeeet? The last word drawn out like a flat note on a horn, or a fart.

The wine being unduly subject to this girl’s ignorance, is Bellefon Salmon, a lovely pink Champagne. From, you know, Champagne. In France. Most people still refer to anything bubbling in their glass as Champagne, even if it didn’t come from anywhere near Champagne.

Since the Treaty of Madrid in 1891, wines could only be legally labeled "Champagne" if they came from there, and this was globally reaffirmed after WWI in the Treaty of Versailles. But because the U.S. Senate never ratified the Treaty (Wilson signed it, though), it claims it doesn't have to abide by these laws. To prevent a global tussle, the U.S. allowed that only certain California producers making sparkling wine before 2006 could label their wines "California Champagne."

America, fuck yeah.

Despite wanting to shoot her into outer space, I smile at the clueless girl and say, No, Darlin, it’s not sweet in the slightest.

Darlin is what I call people when my head has named them worse things. Sweetie, Honey, Sugar. If you hear me say it, it means I think you’re scum. The kind of reprehensible beast I blame for global warming, Robert Parker, ugly fashion trends and most of the music that came out of the 90s. Your inability to learn or think makes you an obedient drone of marketing execs and feeds their endless lust for kinky sex with the filthiest whores they can scrape up on craigslist.

No, Darlin, that Shiraz that I overheard you screeching about earlier with the big “94” printed on the tag is sweeter than this rosé.

She frowns and lets me pour her a taste. She sips it like it’s hemlock and I know what she’s going to say and I brace myself but it shreds me up anyway, makes all the blood run to my forearms, my hands, ready to throttle her to death.

Wow! That’s not sweet at all!

What she is thinking of is that Freshman Rape In A Bottle, Arbor Mist. Boone’s Farm's Strawberry Hill. This stuff is no more wine than I’m a ferret. It’s carbonated sugar – Fanta with 7.5% alcohol. The only thing it has in common with Champagne’s beautiful, strawberry and pebble-kissed dry dry Bellefon Salmon, is the color. And even that isn't similar enough to warrant suspicion. Rosés vary wildly in hue, from deep neon red to palest peach. The color comes from the brief contact the juice has with its red grape skins, and the longer the contact, the more tannins you can usually expect. A fleshy, savory fresh blood-colored ciliegiolo from Liguria can feel bigger in the mouth than a wispy, refreshing Provencal salmon number, but both find their flavors in the red berry spectrum: strawberries, raspberries and cherries. In better rosés, the mineral aspects give it structure - a sparkling brininess at the finish maybe, a chalky, pebbly weight as you drink. This is what keeps it from being just silly, stupid fruit drink.

If a server or bartender suggests “rosé” and you think they are talking about Arbor Mist, you have your head in your ass, which is right where the good folks at Fox News want it. No one – and let me repeat this with the greatest emphasis – no one in the wine or food industry will ever refer to Arbor Mist as a rosé. If they do, stand up and walk out right away. This is a kitchen that intentionally puts cockroaches in their food. They have rabies and sleep under a bridge and wipe their asses with their hands. They alternate which one, so you can't avoid it when you shake.

And heaven help you if you ask me if this is "blush."

The Week in Wankers

2008-12-01T15:26:00.000-08:00

Best quotes of the week:

"I'll have a pee-no griggy-oh"

"So duck egg creme caramel.... is that, like, a Cadbury creme egg?"

"Duck egg? DUCK egg? Like from a real live duck?"

"Where do you get duck eggs?" (My response of course: a duck. His wife then explained to him that ducks also lay eggs)

"I like salt on my fries." (This was how she asked me for some salt, after tasting her pommes frites)

(When asked if they wanted help finding something on the wine list) "I don't think so. I know these wines. Last time I was here I had a Chateau something. It was French. It was red."

"So is that like, a cab sauv?" (After I described the Chateauneuf du Pape)

"We're big foodies, so we don't need help. Can you heat up this iced tea?"

(Upon informing a mean old lady who insisted she was twice my age "and then some" that she's not that much older than I, according to her driver's license) "Oh, you can read."

How To Dine Out Like a Complete Wanker

2008-11-23T16:19:00.001-08:00

A good number of my guests mistakenly assume that not knowing absolutely everything about food and wine makes them look like unsophisticated trash, so they get defensive and make ridiculous proclamations from their pride and vanity. This is what will make you intolerable, not your inexperience. Of course not that. A good number of us actually love hosting you through the gates - so quit shoving back, for chrissakes.

Examples of food fear:

I’m not a cab franc person/I don’t like cab franc
Sweeping proclamations are a dead giveaway. Any person who has spent the bulk of their adult lives serving, making, eating and drinking and studying food and wine knows that there are as many variations of each as there are people making them and the places in which they do it. I’ve had a cab franc from Italy that tasted like three kinds of pepper punching you in the face, and I’ve had cab franc from Napa that tasted like Dr. Pepper syrup with rubbing alcohol mixed in. But mostly, I’ve had red bell pepper nose-orgy, chocolate-covered raspberry velvety yum yum lamb tartar-loving beauties from the Loire Valley. Being that most people I serve are more familiar with the bastardized Franken-wine versions of varietals such as Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, what I hear when they say I do or don’t like [X varietal] is: I don’t like the California versions of [X varietal]. Goody. Neither do I. Now shut up and drink this Cab Franc from Bourgueil that I am recommending. It will pop the top on that sad little box you have put yourself in, letting some much-needed air and sunlight back into your world.

You can go ahead and pour
I hear this one when I have just poured the tasting for the person who ordered the wine. About a third of the time, they flutter their hand at me like a foppish king and yawn go ahead and pour, I’m sure it’s fine.
I think, Awww. You don’t have the slightest idea what to do here, do you? and then I graciously (depending on the night) try to give you a clue on the sly. I might say something like “1 in 20 odds don’t scare you, Sir - you live life dangerously!” and as I pour the other guests at the table (some of whom know what was supposed to have happened) I might offer, “If you find a flaw in the wine, please let me know and I will happily replace it.”
At this point, not you, but someone else at the table might ask what kind of flaws. Look, I don’t expect you all to know this stuff – of course I don’t. Jesus, what kind of asshole do you think I am? But I do expect that when you are, say, flying along at 38,000 feet and the stewardess tells you to fasten your seat belt, you ought to because she knows something you don’t; that 1 in 20 bottles of wines (except for screw caps and synthetic corks, of course) suffer from TCA, the flaw responsible for making your wine smell like wet cardboard and taste flat or otherwise strange. I know you don’t know a good wine from a bad because I’ve drunk the last ounce of whatever is left in your bottle after you’ve left, and lemme tell you, guests have enjoyed oxidized, cooked and corked wines all night long without telling me something was off. Because they didn’t want to look dumb. And they will forever think they didn’t like it because of the varietal, which is like saying you don’t like driving Saabs because the one you rented in Maine last fall had a flat tire. They will be the people who often say I don’t like Cabernet Francs.

Sniffing the cork
Believe it or not, some people actually do this. They usually reside in a red state and our restaurant is the first outside of Applebee’s they visited in a long while. They are usually in town visiting a more “sophist-imicated” sibling or in-laws. They tend to despise the fact that they are there in the first place, and they are frightened of any waiter not wearing suspenders and buttons. They sniff the cork and then tell me I can pour. The other guests blush slightly. They will sometimes mouth sorry. Please don’t apologize. That’s just silly. You’re the one who has to spend Thanksgiving with him, not I.
The cork will not tell you much. If it has TCA, the wine in your glass will tell you. If the wine had any other flaw, you won’t know from the cork. Also, corks smell kind of … corky. So sniffing it really doesn’t give you the most accurate information. But most cork-sniffers watch Fox News, so they’re used to this.

We’re Foodies
Where to begin. The word ‘foodie’ has been created and commandeered by the same people who are convinced they could diagnose an obscure illness by watching “House.” It came into popularity because, comparatively, Americans have a lame sense of national identity, propped up by pop culture and platitudes about freedom. Ashamed and frightened by the Bush administration, we have disowned our culture, which is really just a bedsore of rampant, amoral capitalism. We have fast food joints, diet pills, television, Taylor Swift and are one of the worst polluters in the world. We bowed out of the Kyoto Accords and we torture suspected terrorists. Clinging to any subset of interests that separates us from the embarrassing oil-igarchy is only natural. It’s like walking six feet away from your parents when you’re a teenager. Food is now a more critical matter in determining one's taste than fashion even is. But this novel fervor has created a dreadfully overrated sense of importance. You may not have read Nabokov, but heaven help you if you don’t know what foie gras is.
So when they tell me we’re foodies, what they mean is we are somebody. The foodie merely wants to be recognized as someone who is intelligent, informed and aware. They want me to know they had nothing to do with where we are now – that they are genteel and refined and offended by our plastic and soulless culture. I try to be gentle with the foodie. They just want to be loved. But never forget that they are imposters. Real lovers of food don't have a cute name for themselves, and are identifiable by a number of signs, including:
• A passion for offal. If they say, “Oooh, lamb’s liver with rabbit kidney-onion salad!” my heart leaps a little.
• Asking their server, the liaison between kitchen and guest, what they recommend. This is the act of a real pro. They don’t even have to take the recommendation.
• Animated discussion over the table. Food of any kind fills the cells of the true food lover until they brim over with emotion and enthusiasm. A foodie, on the other hand, is usually awkward and self-conscious, glaring around them and even, oh god help us all!, taking notes on scraps of paper for their blogs. They look miserable, because they think this will get them taken seriously. We will ask how everything is and they will grimace slightly and say “it’s okay.” In their heads, the apt critic is a caricature of an Ambien-sotted George Plimpton. They mistakenly equate ennui with experience. Servers! When this happens, don’t probe, don’t ask if you can get anything else for them. They will only try to make you feel inferior or threaten your job. Just smile and say “and for dessert, I have something I think you, especially, will dig.” They will perk up immeasurably, even though you were imagining them eating a plate of garbage from the dishroom.

I sincerely hope this helps. Someone had to tell you.

Still to come: The Fifth Ring of Hell is Reserved for Yelpers

Opening Night

2008-11-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

I am a server.
A waitperson.
A waitress.
I do not have a preferred nomenclature. A preferred nomenclature is for people who are affected by others' perceptions of them. Listen, you don't wait tables for ten years without developing a thick skin. Besides, we are a crucial part of the pecking order - we are the Greek chorus.
We are the eyes and ears. We observe human behavior in the dark crannies sociologists will never be privy to.

I work in finer dining. I think it's critical to distinguish this from, say, coffeeshops and gaudy chain restaurants, because the expectations and behavior of the guests varies wildly. Compared to the heavy- hitting fine dining of celebrity chef hoo-haw places, mine is pretty casual. Thus the finer dining.

I am working on a graphic novel about waitressing with my friend Chantal Defelice. She is amazing. This is a place for me to organize waitressing stories and rant. Enjoy.