→ October 3, 2009
→ By

Everyday Drinking.

My introduction to Kingsley Amis came through his comic novel Lucky Jim, but Amis was also a prolific columnist on the subject of alcoholic beverages. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis combines two previous anthologies of Amis essays on drink (1973’s primer On Drink and 1983’s collection of newspaper columns Everyday Drinking) with a series of ten-question quizzes, originally published under the title How’s Your Glass?. Although there’s a bit of repetition – mostly of information but occasionally of jokes – between the first and second sections, the volume is educational and extremely witty, plenty to hold the attention of an occasional drinker like myself.

Each essay or column is built around a specific topic, usually a specific drink or class of drink, with digressions on topics like how to drink without getting a hangover, how to stock a liquor cabinet, or the decline of the English pub (so strongly felt that he delivers the same rant twice). Amis’s chief skill in writing these essays, aside from an apparently indefatigable liver, is blending strident opinion with direct advice so that his lectures don’t become shrill or dull.

His essay on liqueurs, for example, starts with an explanation of where that class of beverage originated (from preserving fruits in spirits) to discussions of a few major types to a digression on Southern Comfort, including his discussion of a drink called a Champagne Comfort:

Champagne Comfort is not a difficult drink to imagine, or to make, or to drink. My advice is to stop after the first one unless you have the rest of the day free.

Amis lays into any practice of which he disapproves, referring to lager and lime as “an exit application from the human race if ever there was one” (it’s listed in the index under “lager and lime, unsuitability for higher primates of, 170”) or as a Harvey Wallbanger as a “famous or infamous cocktail … named after some reeling idiot in California.” He expounds on Champagne as “only half a drink. The rest is a name on a label, an inflated price tag, a bit of tradition and a good deal of showing off.” There are several columns and one section on how to stiff your guests by shorting their drinks or by fawning over their wives so the women will defend you to their grousing husbands on the drives home.

While Amis is busy amusing you, he’s educating you on the history and processes of drink as well as offering suggestions and recommendations, even on wine, a beverage he professes to dislike. Understanding drink means understanding ingredients, processes, industrial practices, and accumulated wisdom of old sots like Amis. He writes that it’s best to keep seltzer or sparkling water outside the fridge, as refrigeration kills the bubbles. Why isn’t Jack Daniel’s technically considered a bourbon? (Because it’s made in Tennessee, not in Bourbon County, Kentucky.) What do (or did) winemakers in Bordeaux do in poor harvest years? (Import grapes from Rioja, a region in Spain that’s a major producer of red wines, particularly from the Tempranillo grape.) And he won points with me with several mentions of Tokaj azsu, the sweet wines of Hungary made from grapes affected with the “noble rot” fungus.

He also includes numerous drink recipes, including a few of his own making, one of which is, in fact, named “The Lucky Jim,” a dry martini with cucumber juice. I’ll trust one of you to give that a shot and report back to me.

Next book: Hangover Square, a novel by Patrick Hamilton, author of Rope, a play that became one of Alfred Hitchcock’s more famous films.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ September 24, 2009
→ By

Carcassonne.

Klawchat at 1 pm EDT today. Tentatively scheduled to be on the FAN 590 in Toronto at 6:05 pm.

I’ve been promising this writeup for months but there always seems to be a book or a trip in the way, which is a shame, since Carcassonne is definitely one of my favorite boardgames now and clearly top-ten material.

Carcassonne’s concept is very simple, generally a hallmark of good boardgames. All players build the board as you go, using a collection of square tiles that depict various pieces of roads, cities, and pastures. You keep no hand tiles, drawing one piece per turn and placing it immediately next to one or more pieces already on the table. You must make sure that the edges match – if a tile has a city on one edge, that edge can’t be placed next to a road or a pasture – which limits your options. Along the way, you place your followers, known as “meeples” to hardcore Carcassonne players, on cities, roads, or farms that you build to try to earn points, with bonus points awarded for completing cities, using city tiles with pennants, and for certain tiles available in the many expansions to the core game.

It’s an easy game to pick up but the changing board and the fact that your opponents are simultaneously building, often nearby, make gameplay different every time. You can play a solitary game, especially if you’re just playing one other person, but you can also play in a way that tries to steal points from your opponents by merging one of your cities with one of theirs, since the points for a completed (“closed”) city go to the player with the most meeples occupying tiles in that city.

The trickiest part of the game is the use of farms, which can be more valuable than cities if played properly. When you play a meeple on a city or road, you get the meeple back to redeploy once that city is closed or that road is completed. When you play a meeple on a farm, however, he’s there for the rest of the game. When the game ends, a player gets points for each closed city that his farm abuts, but a player often doesn’t have much control over how his farm grows, and a player can end up with nothing for one of his meeples if farms merge as the board develops and he’s outnumber on that farm when the game ends. As a result, when and where to place meeples is the main strategic decision for Carcassonne players, since you have no control over what tiles you draw but have complete control over meeple placement.

We’ve played with two to four players; four players can take a while, but two player games run under a half hour for us, especially since my wife and I tend to play apart from each other on the board. I’ve played online a few times, including two games against players who spent all of their time trying to glom on to my cities (by creating a new nearby city and attempting to merge the two), and not only was the strategy annoying, it didn’t seem to work – you can keep the game close that way, but you can’t get ahead without building some cities and farms of your own, so I never pursue this strategy myself.

We’ve used two Carcassonne expansions. The game currently comes with the first River expansion, twelve tiles that you use to start the game; it provides some structure and helps break up farms, but it doesn’t substantially change gameplay. The second, Traders and Builders, adds a number of new tiles, as well as two new pieces: the Builder, which allows a player to draw an extra tile when adding to the city/road the builder occupies; and the Pig, which increases the final value of the farm on which he’s placed. Both the Builder piece and the new tile configurations added quite a bit to the game, changing strategies but also providing more flexibility and, depending on how you use the Builder, allowing you to avoid wasted turns.

I’ll do one more game post in the next few weeks, updating the top ten and reposting the comments lost from the original thread last fall.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: ,
→ September 23, 2009
→ By

The Risk Pool.

My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.

Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool cemented my affinity for his writing. I’m not sure if there’s a contemporary American novelist out there who can match Russo for both creating flawed characters and showing a clear affection for them despite their flaws, written in clear, modern prose with plenty of humor.

*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.

The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.

Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.

Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.

The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:

She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).

Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness. Also, for those of you who were interested in a “book club” of sorts, how about Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? (Granted, I might have made that subtitle up.) It’s coming up in my queue, and it’s on the short side so it should be accessible to everyone. If I have a handful of takers, I’ll fix a discussion date about two weeks ahead of us.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 18, 2009
→ By

Ironweed.

Klaw links: Yesterday’s chat transcript. Yesterday’s hit on Mike & Mike in the Morning. A quick take on Pittsburgh’s 2010 rotation and on the Angels’ complaints about Wednesday’s umpiring.

William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Ironweed, which also appeared at #92 on the Modern Library 100, is the third novel in his Albany Cycle, which started with Legs and continued with Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. Ironweed tells the story of Billy Phelan’s father, who appears briefly in the second novel as a pivotal character in Billy’s background but isn’t fleshed out at all until this third novel, which is by turns poignant and farcical, with strong prose and a smart, well-used literary device to make Francis Phelan’s difficulty dealing with his past more real to the reader.

The novel, set in 1936, shows Francis as an itinerant bum with an alcohol problem, surrounded by other bums in various stages of inebriation, several of whom are racing headlong for the grave. Francis himself played for the Washington Senators, but his career was bookended by two tragedies in which he had a hand – the death of a strikebreaker before he started playing, and the accidental death of his two-week-old son after – which drove him to alcohol and to abandon his family and hometown. Now, twenty years after his son’s death, Francis has returned to Albany to try to make peace with his past:

The latter name suddenly acted as a magical key to history for Francis. He sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his histroy, of how many had died or been maimed by his hand, or had died, like that nameless pair of astonished shades, as an indirect result of his violent ways.

Those shades, two of many Francis sees, are people in whose deaths he played some small part, as well as some people he otherwise wronged. They only appear to Francis, but whether they are ghosts or visions or hallucinations is never explained, nor does Kennedy need to do so. Francis has to deal with them regardless of their state before he can make any attempt to reconnect with the family he left behind. The themes that develop from there are somewhat obvious, such as Francis needing to forgive himself before he can seek forgiveness from anyone else, but the way that Kennedy unfolds them was both novel and gripping in a way that most emotion-driven books are not for me.

Next up: Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 15, 2009
→ By

Nice Guys Finish Last.

Leo Durocher’s Nice Guys Finish Last was re-released today, as one of many good baseball books of the 1970s that had fallen out of print (a category that includes the indispensable Weaver on Strategy, which was out of print before a 2002 reissue). Durocher’s book is rambling, funny, insightful, maybe not all his (did he really say of Judge Landis, “The legend has been spread that the owners hired the Judge off the federal bench. Don’t you believe it. They got him right out of Dickens?”), but absolutely worth the read.

The book doesn’t have much of a narrative structure, working more as a collection of anecdotes presented in a vague chronological order, although more identification of the year(s) under discussion would have helped. The bulk of the book focuses on his time playing with the Cardinals and managing the Dodgers and Giants, with a pretty good balance of straight baseball stories and Durocher’s own antics, mostly involving umpires, like this exchange between him and a frequent sparring partner of his:

And, sure enough, he said it again. “I’ll reach down and bite your head off.”
“If you do,” I said, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”
And I’m in the clubhouse.

In addition to being a great baseball book, Nice Guys Finish Last is a bloodletting, as Durocher gets every grudge and bit of dirt off his chest, with many famous names from baseball history ending up the worse for it. Ernie Banks, Milt Pappas, Joe Pepitone, Leland MacPhail (Andy’s grandfather), Happy Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Branch Rickey, Red Smith, and Cesar Cedeno all show up to play roles in Durocher’s stories and leave with egg on their faces and stains on their reputations. Even Jackie Robinson takes some criticism for showing up to spring training out of shape, while Durocher blames Banks for protecting his own reputation while undermining Durocher’s authority. Of course, I’m not sure how seriously to take some of the accusations, since most are first-person recollections of events that took place five to forty years before the book’s publication, but they made for good reading.

In addition to the unclear writing around certain dates and the question of the accuracy of Mr. Durocher’s memory, his baseball thinking reads today as very old school. He describes hitters by their average, homers, and RBI – although that could just as easily have been the work of his co-author, Ed Linn – and goes on a long rant near the end of the book about, in essence, why he liked scrappy players more than raw-talent players, even though he offers pages of effusive praise of Willie Mays, who was all raw talent but emotionally fragile. Durocher worked for Branch Rickey, one of the most progressive thinkers in baseball’s first century, but many of Rickey’s prized ideas, like working the count, either made no impression on the Lip or didn’t register enough to show up in his memoirs.

Apropos of nothing, one other passage struck a bit of a personal chord with me:

I thought, in fact, of something Laraine had said to me the first time she met Mr. Rickey. Because they were both such religious people I had been confident they would get along marvelously. Instead of the instant rapport I was expecting, there was instant non-rapport. “This man isn’t your friend, Leo,” she told me after he had gone. “I know you think the sun rises and sets on him, but he isn’t what you think he is.”

That’s precisely the sentiment my wife expressed on meeting my (former) boss in Toronto. She always has been a good judge of people.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Tales of the Jazz Age.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with both Tender is the Night (#2) and The Great Gatsby (#17) appearing high on the Klaw 100, but before last week had only read eight of his short stories, those contained in his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of The Jazz Age contains another eleven stories, although the edition I read indicates that Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories during his short writing career, using them largely to pay the bills as his novels didn’t come into such wide esteem as they hold today until after his death.

Of the eleven stories, only four really stood out, although there isn’t a bad read in the bunch because FSF was (and remains, I suppose) such a master of prose. The most famous story, at least today, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is just as you’ve heard – the story of a man who is born at seventy years old and ages in reverse. It’s a clever gambit, and there are some little flourishes around how your apparent age affects the way people treat you (let’s just say that resonated with me), but the story itself isn’t much of a story – just a linear run through his life from 70 to 0. I did find it amusing to see that FSF received mail from loonies much as I do today, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Tales, although the edition I read has the word “piece” spelled as “peice” throughout the crackpot’s missive.

My favorite story in the bunch – and easily the most macabre – was “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the story of a rather strange and insanely wealthy family camped out in a never-surveyed corner of Montana. The family will go to tremendous lengths to protect the secret of their wealth and their very existence. The story works on its own as a Hitchcockian suspense tale, but the family’s anachronistic ways set them up as a strong symbol of traditional views and practices that refuse or even fight attempts to introduce modernity to their world.

The collection also includes one straight-up romance, “The Camel’s Back,” that is almost inconsequential in plot but extremely well-written and witty, and a subtle meditation on risk and safety in life choices called “Oh Russet Witch!” Nothing in the collection is unreadable, although the phrasing in “The Tarquin of Cheapside,” which Fitzgerald wrote while he was at Princeton, is a little over-the-top, and “The Lees of Happiness” is quite sad without any point beyond, hey, sometimes life sucks.

Next up: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 5, 2009
→ By

Philadelphia eats.

Before I get to Philly, a few of you have asked about the restaurant where my cousin is the pastry chef. It’s called City Limits Diner, and there are two locations, one on the edge of White Plains near Yonkers, the other in Stamford, Connecticut. My cousin is the pastry chef and her husband is the executive chef. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t genuinely like the food. If you do go, make sure you have dessert, and tell your server that Tracy’s cousin Keith sent you (not that it will get you anything, but it’ll score me some points).

I ate all of my non-ballpark meals in Philly at Reading Terminal Market, an eating paradise on Filbert between 11th and 12th streets, right across from the Market East train station. I could have stayed a week and still had places there I wanted to try.

For breakfast, I hit the Dutch Eating Place – Dutch as in Pennsylvania Dutch, a community responsible for at least ten of the stands around the market. They’re best known for their blueberry pancakes, which were solid average or a bit above, and for their cured meats, which were a mixed bag – the pork sausage was meaty and peppery and the portion was beyond generous, but the turkey bacon was gamey and greasy. I also tried their “apple” french toast, which as far as I can tell, was just some whole or multi-grain sandwich bread, dipped in egg batter, fried, and topped with too much cheap cinnamon, with no evidence whatsoever of apples. The pancakes were worth a trip, though. Cash only, cost $10 including tea and tip both days.

DiNic’s serves hot Italian sandwiches in just a few varieties, but everyone recommended the roast pork, thinly sliced, served on fresh crusty Italian bread, with just a few possible toppings – sharp provolone, roasted peppers (sweet or hot), broccoli rabe, or spinach. I went with the rabe and sweet peppers. The sandwich was about a foot long, so I barely got halfway through it, and the inside of the bread was soaked with the juice of the pork (that’s a good thing). For about $8 it’s a bargain and was the best thing I ate on the trip.

Delilah’s Soul Food had some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. Even though the chicken was more warm than hot when I got it, the crust was still crispy, not greasy, and was well seasoned with salt and pepper without having too much of either. For $8.50 or so you get chicken, cornbread (the sweet kind, unfortunately), and one side; I chose collard greens and got a big bowl that I got maybe halfway through and then poured the juice at the bottom over the cornbread. It’s one of the few places in RTM with table service.

The Famous Fourth Street Cookie Company had a long line around lunch time on my first trip there; the cookies are constantly coming out of the oven, so you can get something hot at that hour, although I found that at room temperature a few hours later, they were just average cookies. They’re a good four inches or so in diameter and cost about $2 apiece. The “double chocolate chip” is just a chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chips, and the chocolate chip with pecans didn’t skimp on the nuts.

I grabbed a pumpkin muffin from Le Bus Bakery for the flight home; it was a bit greasy, staining the paper bag, but it didn’t have the usual pumpkin muffin flavor of stale pumpkin pie spice mix, and it wasn’t overly sweet. There was a faint spicy note, almost like cardamom, but otherwise the pumpkin was allowed to take its place at the center of the muffin.

Leaving RTM, La Colombe is a small cafe best known for its coffee-roasting operation, as they apparently supply many of the best restaurants in town. I found their espresso to be far too watery with no body, but it did have a defined flavor, with strong notes of cocoa beans and a pleasant acidity. My guess is that the beans were from Africa, although I’m no expert on varietals since I always use blends to make espresso at home.

I learned about Capogiro Gelato a few years ago on the short-lived Food Network show, The Hungry Detective, a good concept dressed up with a few too many gimmicks but with plenty of emphasis on the actual food. They have at least one more location now, at 13th and Walnut, very close to my hotel and the RTM. The gelato is very expensive – a medium, roughly 3/4 cup of gelato, cost $6.15 with tax – but outstanding quality. I got three flavors, figuring that was almost an obligation to my readers: dark chocolate, coconut, and toasted almond. The almond was a waste, as the gelato itself had almost no flavor; it comes with toasted slivered almonds, but the flavor needs to be in the gelato, not on it. The coconut was ultra-smooth with a strong, clean coconut flavor. The dark chocolate stole the show, probably the darkest, richest chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had, with a thick consistency more like cocoa pudding ice cream than a typical chocolate gelato; a medium cup of that might be overkill, but I’m willing to risk it.

I didn’t eat at any concessions at CBP, but it’s worth mentioning that the press box food was, by press box food standards, impressive. The worst part of eating while traveling is how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables while sticking to quick, inexpensive places, and the CBP press box had cups of fresh fruit, a basic salad mix that wasn’t brown or wilted or dried out, and a few vegetable side dishes each night. I know this isn’t of much use to the majority of you, but I wanted to give credit to the Phillies for doing a nice job.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
→ August 24, 2009
→ By

Denver eats.

There’s a short blog entry on Troy Tulowitzki’s surge from Saturday night on my ESPN blog, with another just filed this morning.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2 and 2:30 pm EDT and possibly on 710 AM in Los Angeles around 12:40 pm PDT.

Denver rocks. What a great downtown – I probably walked six or seven miles in the three days, hopped the free shuttle on 16th a few times, and had a few good meals. I love downtown ballparks where there’s an actual downtown around the park, and Coors Field has a lot going on in the area. (The presence of many clubs nearby meant quite a bit of postgame eye candy walking the other way up Blake Street, a nice bonus.)

I got four different breakfast suggestions from readers but only one was really walkable from the hotel (I didn’t rent a car) – Snooze, on Larimer, very close to the stadium. Three of you recommended it and I can see why, as their food is very fresh and they make some excellent, funky pancakes.

I went twice, and the pancakes are clearly the main attraction. The first day, I got the ginger-peach pancakes, which had diced local peaches and crystallized ginger in the batter and a topping of streusel (just a little) and ginger butter. The second day, I went with eggs, chorizo sausage, hashbrowns, plus one whole wheat-blueberry pancake with sunflower seeds, maple syrup, and blueberry butter. Both types of pancakes had a great, light texture, with lots of big air pockets and a complex flavor. The whole wheat ones were either from a mild sourdough batter or made with buttermilk, probably the latter. The peaches, unfortunately, weren’t fully ripe and ended up bitter after cooking, but I imagine on a better day they’re pretty outstanding. They also do a pancake of the day; Sunday’s had white chocolate chips in the batter, which sounded too much like dessert to me.

My first meal at Snooze came with a bit of entertainment. I was seated in one of the five chairs at the counter, and the seat to my right opened up, at which point a woman asked me if anyone was sitting there and I told her no. She proceeded to sit there to make a call on her cell phone but didn’t actually order anything, so after five minutes or so, the host told her she couldn’t sit there. A little while later, she sat down to eat in the chair to my left, and before she’d finished the process of sitting she asked me which pancakes I had gotten. It was downhill from there:

Me: The ginger-peach pancakes.

Her: What kind of peaches are they?

Me: (reaching over, opening her menu, and pointing to the entry for the ginger-peach pancakes.) It’s all right there.

Her: Yeah, but I want to know what kind of peaches they are.

Me: I don’t know. Why don’t you check the menu?

Her: But are they canned peaches?

Me: I don’t know.

Her: I just want to know if they’re canned peaches.

Me: Ma’am, I did not actually make the pancakes. I’m only eating them. Perhaps you should ask someone who works here?

Her: How could you be in such a bad mood? It’s too early to be in a bad mood.

Oh, it gets better. She had already ordered breakfast to go, but then, just as it was coming out, she decided to sit at the counter and made them take the pancakes she ordered out of the portable container and put them on a plate, which seemed petty and wasteful. Then she ordered a sampler of two or three other kinds of pancakes – like I said, these are huge – and tried the one she originally ordered, the whole-wheat blueberry pancakes, which come with maple syrup already on them. And that set her off again.

Her: Why does it come with the syrup already on the pancakes?

Server: That’s how we serve that pancake here, ma’am.

Her: But the pancakes get soaked. The syrup makes it too sweet. You know that maple syrup is mostly sugar!

Server: Ma’am, it says on the menu that it comes with maple syrup on it. [To be fair, the menu wasn’t explicit about this.]

Her: You should never serve it on the pancakes already. You should serve it on the side.

Server: Well, that’s how we do it … here.

When I went back on Sunday and sat at the counter, the server (a different one), asked if I’d been there before, and I said yes, the previous morning, and I was sitting next to a crazy woman. At which point he said, “Oh, you must have been sitting in that same chair, and she was there (pointing to her seat).” Apparently, she’s a regular, and she’s always batty.

That day-two server actually tried to coax me out of my EMP + a pancake order, saying, “You can get three eggs anywhere. I think what you really need is a benedict,” and he’s right in that they do have a half-dozen options of eggs and hollandaise. I’m not a big hollandaise guy anyway – I respect any chef willing to make it because it’s time-consuming and finicky, but I find it extremely heavy – and Snooze’s hollandaises all contained either cream cheese (which I don’t care for) or smoked cheddar (which I despise), so while a few of those options looked great (like the one with smoked pork), I didn’t see the point of getting a benedict-hold-the-hollandaise. He was right, though – the eggs etc. were on the boring side and the hashbrowns were undercooked, with nowhere near enough crispy brown parts.

When I went to Long Beach earlier this month, I had sushi at Koi over in Seal Beach and sat at the sushi bar. A guy sat down next to me and clearly had been there a few times, so I asked if he was a regular, and he said he had been for years but had since moved to Denver. So we chatted for a while, and I told him I was there on business, I was a sportswriter, loved food, etc., and he said, “Wait, what’s your name?” Turns out he’s not a reader, but a friend of his is, so I pointed Gabe (the guy I was sitting next to) here and asked him to shoot me a note with some Denver food rec’s. He suggested Sushi Sasa, which turned out to be one of the best sushi places I have ever been to. It was a solid 20-minute walk from the hotel, but I got a spectacular view of the river as I crossed over the bridge to get to Platte St, and the food was well worth it.

Sushi Sasa is kind of trendy-looking inside and they do plenty of gussied-up rolls and overwrought appetizers, but if you go there for nigiri or sashimi, the fish is amazingly fresh, easily rivaling that of good West Coast or NYC joints. Sasa’s daily specials menu mentioned that two of the fish had been flown in from some specific market in Japan that day, and they make their own unagi (barbecued fresh-water eel), which I’m told (by some of you, I believe) is unusual, as most places buy it already cooked and just reheat it for service. The maguro tuna was the best I’ve ever tasted and the salmon was close. The seaweed salad was a bit of a rip at $8 and came with some very fresh but unnecessary vegetables on top (e.g., one asparagus spear, cut into 2″ lengths), but it was interesting to see three different kinds of seaweed instead of the standard one, including a burgundy variety I’ve never had before that was slightly bitter and didn’t have the tooth of the more typical, green-and-clear kind. (Sorry, I’m not up on my seaweed terminology.) Even the green tea was good.

(By the way, I’m a piker in the kitchen compared to Gabe, who chronicles some of his cooking exploits on his blog, including making his own duck prosciutto.)

My one other stop was a minor indulgence, as I am a bit of a sucker for local fast-food burger joints and saw one called Good Times across the street from my hotel. It’s not Five Guys or In-n-Out, with a bigger menu and fries that aren’t hand-cut, but for a fast-food option it was two or three steps above the McDonald’s/BK class of “only if I’m desperate and even then I’ll think twice” establishments. The toppings at Good Times were also very fresh – bright green lettuce that still crunched, thick slices of juicy and faintly sweet tomatoes – and the beef (100% all natural Coleman … do I even want to know what 80% natural beef has as its other 20%?) was better than the bland, generic fast-food burgers forced down our throa… Sorry again, CSPI just hacked my blog, but I’m back. It’s a solid fast-food burger. The fries are coated, which I don’t really like, but they’re seasoned and not over-salted; skip the “wild sauce,” which is just barbecue sauce mixed with mayonnaise and is the color of terra cotta. Good Times also serves frozen custard, which I tried the night before, although they only do two flavors a day, vanilla and a special flavor, which was strawberry on Saturday. The vanilla had a good custard texture, and the mild flavor was nothing a little hot fudge couldn’t fix.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 18, 2009
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San Juan card game.

Chat 3 pm EDT on the four-letter. ESPN 710 Seattle at 2 pm PDT. AllNight later on tonight. Waiting for confirmation but I should be on ESPN 1250 Pittsburgh tomorrow at around 11 am EDT.

Back when I did my original post on board games, several readers recommended Puerto Rico, a 3-5 player game that can be played with two players but that is apparently better with more people involved. When I pointed out that my wife and I play a lot of these games ourselves, at least one of you recommended the 2-4 player spinoff, a card game called San Juan.

The game takes a while to explain but is very simple to play. In each round, there are phases (one per player) that allow players to build new buildings, produce goods, sell goods they’ve produced, or draw extra cards from the deck. The cards serve several functions: a player can use them to pay for buildings, a player can build the building on the card’s face if he has enough cards, and a player can stash them under a Chapel to sock away some bonus points for the end of the game. The game ends when one player has built twelve buildings in his settlement, after which the player with the most points is the winner. Having the most buildings doesn’t mean you’ll have the most points, as different buildings have different point values, and some buildings are worth bonus points based on what else each player has in his settlement.

Once you’ve started the game, it’s easy to follow and moves pretty quickly; as you add to your settlement, the rate at which you can produce, build, and sell improves, since each building has some bonus feature like reducing the cost of certain buildings or allowing you to produce an extra good during the production phase. All of the other two-player games we regularly play take far longer, so it’s great to have a fun alternative when it’s late and we want to play something fast.

The game also has a good mix of strategy and luck. There are clearly better and worse ways to build your settlement, and you have to make major decisions like whether to build another production building or whether to start building the violet-card buildings, which have the bonus features I mentioned above and are generally worth more points. You have to decide which cards in your hand to use as currency and which to keep so you can ultimately play and build them. The prices of goods change slightly from turn to turn, leading to sell-or-wait decisions. But you’re also at the mercy of the cards you draw, making the game different each time but also perhaps preventing you from always using the same strategy.

And since it’s just a big deck of cards and a few cardboard pieces to mark phases and prices, it’s extremely portable, which never hurts.

I still have to write about Carcassonne, after which it’ll be time to revise the board game rankings.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , ,
→ August 15, 2009
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Stupid Love.

I’ve mentioned this before, but country singer Mindy Smith is actually a former classmate of mine – from second grade on through high school. I’d lost touch with her after we graduated but we reconnected a year or two ago when I found about her music career and contacted her manager, who sent me a copy of her newest album, Stupid Love, which came out earlier this week.

This isn’t ordinarily my style of music, but I did really enjoy the album beyond just being supportive of an old friend. The album runs about half-and-half between upbeat, folky-alternative songs and mournful ballads, with the former making more of an impression after my first listen than the latter, which required a few more spins for me. The first single, “Highs and Lows,” and the opening track, “What Went Wrong,” both would fit on an alternative rock station’s playlist; “Highs and Lows” sounds a bit like a lost David Gray track, while “What Went Wrong” is more power-pop along the lines of Jellyfish or the Primitives with a folk influence. The album’s closer, “Take a Holiday,” will probably pop up on half a dozen soundtracks over the next few years – it’s a closing-credits kind of song with a shuffling beat and a repeated lyrical gimmick of rhetorical questions asked by someone who’s hit a rut and can’t quite get out. The ballads are more of a mixed bag; the duet “True Love of Mine” has (non-cheesy) wedding song written all over it (and lo and behold, her duet partner Daniel Tashian sounds a lot like … David Gray!), and “Love Lost” does a great job of showcasing Smith’s sharp, smoky voice, but “Disappointed” feels underproduced and harsh and the ship metaphor in “Telescope” seemed a bit hackneyed to me.

The best part about this album, at least at the moment, is that you can download the whole thing for $3.99 at amazon.com. I doubt that’s the permanent price, but the discount has Stupid Love #2 on amazon’s mp3 album charts. I’m not sure how much of my audience is into this kind of music – anything from straight country to Sarah McLachlan – but I’ll offer a cheerfully biased recommendation that you give Stupid Love a shot.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,