philadelphia — Page 2

→ July 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GEN looks at evangelical women who’ve left their churches and the Republican Party because they couldn’t reconcile Christian support for Trump with the ostensible tenets of the religion.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Thomas Chatterson Williams, one of the authors of the Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ on the left; it’s an informative conversation, made better because Chotiner is unafraid to challenge Williams’ inaccuracies and to correct others in the final text.
The Jackson Free Press spoke to doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s dedicated COVID-19 ICU about how overloaded they are and how sick the victims become. The executive vice chair of emergency medicine, begging people to wear masks and keep distancing, says, “Please don’t make this worse.”
A SPLC Hatewatch investigation found that OANN employee Jack Posobiec went to Poland to meet with a Polish neo-Nazi party, promoting their messages through his popular Twitter account.
Customs and Border Protection is involved in far more cities than just Portland, and they’re not being transparent about their activities.
Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to make the pandemic there appear less serious than it actually was.
WIRED looks at the difficulty of calculating herd immunity requirements for COVID-19; the quick summary is that we need a vaccine to get there.
A group of over 100 scientists called for a rapid review system for research preprints so papers like the Stanford one that used highly questionable methods to claim that the rate of COVID-19 infection was 50 times higher in California than widely accepted don’t get widely reported before they’re further vetted.
To be a parent right now is to be a liar, writes Dan Sinker for Esquire.
Dave Grohl – yep, that one – wrote an op ed in the Atlantic in defense of teachers, saying we need better plans before we reopen schools.
Why have rates of premature births gone way down in some areas during the pandemic?
Here’s a list of all of the known QAnon supporters running for Congress this year, or who tried to run; fourteen have already secured spots on November ballots. Sixty-two of the 67 are Republicans. Meanwhile, Twitter has at least begun to ban or limit accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, on the grounds that the ‘movement’ is associated with increasing violence. Facebook needs to do the same.
Over 280 Wall Street Journal employees signed a letter to the paper’s new publisher asking for a clearer distinction between the news and opinion sections, something the paper reported on itself (subscription required).
A Philadelphia attorney who makes her living evicting people on behalf of city courts is married to a city eviction judge who doesn’t recuse himself from cases involving her.
Quanta has a pretty good, concise explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced the release of a new RPG, Kids on Brooms, that is itself a spinoff of the game Kids on Bikes.
Capstone announced the late 2020 release of Renature, from designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, which I assume is a sequel to their 2017 game Reworld. The two are probably best known for their collaborations on Tikal and Torres.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, math, philadelphia, stick to baseball

→ November 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/23/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I discussed the baseball case for trading Mookie Betts, and looked at the Yasmani Grandal and Will Smith signings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Watergate, a great and well-timed new two-player game where you play either as Nixon or as the journalists trying to uncover the scandal. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the social deduction game Game of Thrones Oathbreaker, a game with team & individual components that I think is too unbalanced.

My new book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. Stand by for news on store events, including Politics & Prose in DC and Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

I’ll send out the latest edition of my free email newsletter later today, talking a little about the philosophical debates I’m having with myself over this year’s Hall of Fame ballot.

My friend Jessica Scarane is mounting a primary challenge to Delaware Senator Chris Coons; Coons is a centrist Democrat who, among other things, thought Nats fans were wrong to boo President Trump, and who regularly works with the GOP. You can donate to Jess’s campaign on her website.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Kevin Arnovitz describes how a Sacramento Kings exec pilfered $13 million from the team before he was caught.
A Newsday investigation found evidence of steering and de facto redlining in the Long Island real estate market.
This New Yorker profile of the 47-year-old Park Slope Food Co-Op is fascinating, by turns a paean to a community effort to make people and the planet healthier, and a portrait of how insufferable other people can be.
The Atlantic‘s Sarah Zhang detailed how a few Internet sleuths helped identify a Jane Doe murdered 13 years ago.
NPR reports on how the federal government is depriving U.S. territories of Medicaid funding, which may result in half or more of Guam and U.S. Virgin Islands residents losing their coverage, and Puerto Rican residents losing dental and prescription drug coverage. I should also point out that citizens of these territories do not vote for President and lack any representation in Congress.
MLB.com’s Joe Trezza has a thorough overview of how Mike Elias has reshaped the O’s baseball ops department.
Lindsay Gibbs of the Athletic wrote in her newsletter this week about Malcolm Gladwell’s betrayal of sexual abuse victims with his Penn State trutherism and misquoting of Michigan State victims. In addition to his own podcast, Gladwell was a guest on ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast about the L.A. Clippers just three weeks ago, well after he’d started this weird campaign.
Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins wrote an editorial urging mayor Jim Kenney to consider transparency and accountability when choosing the city’s next police commissioner. The city’s police union issued a juvenile response, calling him a “nonresident washed up [sic] football player,” which Jenkins simply called a “distraction.”
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Wharton/Penn Law professor Natasha Sarin point out that improving the IRS’s auditing capabilities and resources should be the first step in any tax reform proposal because (according to their research) every $1 spent on auditing would yield $11 in increased revenue. That obviously can’t continue indefinitely – the ratio will decline with increased auditing, as the easiest targets are made to pay up and other tax scofflaws improve their compliance to avoid getting caught – but they refer to this as “low-hanging fruit” that also should be politically popular.
A former writer for The Simpsons explains how the “attempted crime isn’t a crime” defense of Trump comes from that show, where Sideshow Bob asked how attempted murder could be a crime.
Also in the Washington Post, two editorial writers described this week how Gordon Sundland’s testimony made the Trump/Ukraine scandal much bigger.
Should the Parthenon (“Elgin”) Marbles be returned to Greece? I mean, of course they should, but Mary Norris argues in favor as well. Also, they’re marble statues, not, like, actual marbles.
A mother explains why she chose not to use car seats.
Why has Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent, retracted paper on vaccines and autism been cited over a thousand times? The reasons are complex but one key takeaway is that the system of citing breaks down when the cited papers are partially or fully retracted.
Board game news: Alder Quest, a new area control game for 1-4 players, just hit Kickstarter this week.
A new game from the publishers of Ragusa (which I demoed but haven’t actually played), Venice is now on Kickstarter as well, with a very cool-looking board of streets and canals in the soon-to-be-underwater city.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, links, longreads, philadelphia, taxes, the swamp

→ February 15, 2019
→ By keith

Top 25 restaurants in Philly for 2019.

I’ve wanted to put this post together for ages, but wanted also to be sure I’d tried enough restaurants in the city for my list to make some sense. I think I’ve done that now, although there’s always more to try, and living a bit outside the city I’m at a slight disadvantage.

1. High Street on Market (Old City). My favorite spot in the city for breakfast or lunch, and they do dinner as well, although it’s the one meal I haven’t eaten there. The menus are built around their amazing, old-world breads; the breakfast Forager sandwich is to die for, and they make the best roast pork sandwich in the city. Their sister restaurant, Fork, is also on the list.

2. Suraya (Fishtown). Recently named the #1 restaurant in the city by Philly magazine, this all-day Lebanese restaurant, with a café/market in front and fine-ish dining in back, does Levantine cooking right, with classic preparations of the mezze (small starters, like hummus and muhammara) served with piping-hot pitas. There are a few non-traditional items here too, but go with a gang and stuff yourselves with a bunch of mezze.

3. Vedge (Midtown Village). A vegan restaurant to satisfy almost any omnivore; they do incredible things with vegetables so that the dishes are satisfying and visually stunning, and so you won’t think about the absence of meat. I still can’t believe the sunchoke bisque amuse bouche didn’t have dairy in it, and the toasted marshmallows in my dessert were indistinguishable from those made with egg whites.

4. Bud & Marilyn’s (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s best-rated restaurant does American comfort food with upscale twists, including various fried chicken dishes and outstanding salads – I’ve recreated a fennel, brussels sprout, and green apple salad I had there in December 2017 a dozen times at home.

5. Cheu (Fishtown). I’d say “best ramen in Philly” but I haven’t had it many places. They do make great ramen, and have great cocktails. It’s near Suraya; parking is a pain on that whole stretch.

6. Hungry Pigeon (Queen Village). My birthday dinner last year was here, and we ordered a strange assortment of dishes, but everything was excellent (well, my daughter might disagree on the asparagus). They use fresh pasta from the Little Noodle Pasta Company, a spinoff of the now-closed Ela in the same neighborhood. The dessert, a ‘diner-style’ coconut cream cake, was four large portions by our standards.

7. Fork (Old City). High Street’s sister and neighbor does superb fine dining in a quieter, more upscale atmosphere, with a great wine/cocktail list.

8. Abe Fisher (Rittenhouse). I haven’t been to Zahav, Michael Solomonov’s flagship restaurant, but I’ve been here, which is still on the high end but more affordable and I think a bit more accessible. The menu is inspired by but not limited to Jewish-American cooking traditions. The gougères they serve instead of a bread basket are superb, and my daughter will tell you it’s the best Shirley Temple in the city.

9. Osteria (Fairmount). Osteria was a Marc Vetri restaurant, included in the sale of most of Vetri’s portfolio to Urban Outfitters, then purchased last year by the owners of Sampan and Double Knot. Most of their signature dishes, including house-made pastas and pizzas, are still on the menu, including the chicken liver rigatoni that my daughter once described as “it sounds gross, but it’s really good.” (She was 8.)

10. Royal Boucherie (Old City). Top Chef winner Nicholas Elmi’s second restaurant in Philly – I haven’t been to Laurel – is an “American brasserie” with a lot of French influence on the menu and a very lively bar. Their desserts are superb and they have one of the best lists of amari (potable bitters) I’ve come across.

11. Pizzeria Vetri (Arts District & Rittenhouse). I’ve only been to the original location, going many, many times since it first opened, and they do a small list of Neapolitan pizza options very well, as long as their signature rotolo, pizza dough rolled like a buche de noel with mortadella, cheese, and pistachios; as well as light, house-made soft-serve ice cream. Service here has always been excellent for a fast-casual spot.

12. Brigantessa (East Passyunk). Pizzas and house-made pastas from southern Italian peasant food traditions. They did have an issue last fall that resulted in the firing of their chef de cuisine, later than they should have, over anti-Semitic comments and mistreatment of staff.

13. Le Virtu (East Passyunk). Abruzzese cuisine – that’s east central Italy – which contains many dishes and ingredients you’d recognize as “Italian” but sometimes in different combinations. It’s a region I associate especially with mushrooms and that was indeed the pasta dish that most stood out to me when I ate there last month.

14. V Street (Rittenhouse). Vedge’s ‘vegan street food’ offshoot; the fried tofu taco with two slaws manages to deliver the satisfying crunch of a fish taco and make me forget I’m eating tofu, a food that I’ll consume but would rarely describe as memorable. I wish they were open more hours.

15. Royal Izakaya (Queen Village). An izakaya that takes its sake and shochu very seriously, with an intimidating menu of small plates to go along with the booze.

16. Amis (Washington Square). Another former Vetri outpost, amis focuses on the cuisines of Rome and the surrounding Lazio region in a quirky converted warehouse-like setting. When I went, I had two specials, both involving duck, that were superb.

17. Pizzeria Stella (Society Hill). A Stephen Starr outpost very close to I-95 and the waterfront, Stella does traditional Neapolitan-style pizzas with a few pasta and starter options and home-made gelato for dessert.

18. Barbuzzo (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s flagship, still known for great pasta dishes (the ricotta gnocchi are superb), good pizzas, seasonal vegetable dishes, and that salted caramel budino.

19. Stock (Fishtown/Rittenhouse). A BYOB with two locations – I’ve only been to Fishtown – that serves the best banh mi I’ve had here, as well as southeast Asian soups and cold noodle dishes.

20. Dinic’s (Reading Terminal Market). This is where you go if you want a very classic Philly roast pork sandwich (with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe, please). They do other sandwiches I don’t eat, but why bother?

21. Poi Dog (Rittenhouse). If you want poke, this is your place. They have spam musubi too if that’s how you roll.

22. Dizengoff (Rittenhouse Square). Solomonov’s hummus outpost, with shakshuka on the weekends, will often have a line out the door. His Federal Donuts is across the street but I don’t care for their donuts and haven’t tried their Korean fried chicken.

23. Lolita (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s upscale Mexican spot has great margaritas, tacos, taquizas, enchiladas, and a few fun sides like elote and maduros.

24. El Vez (Midtown Village). Stephen Starr’s straightforward Mexican spot with a large menu of guacamole options and very good if predictable American-Mexican food.

25. Farmicia (Old City). Farm-to-table food with a wide menu that I find great if you don’t know if your fellow diners are adventurous eaters, since they offer plenty of accessible options plus some quirky dishes for the more daring eaters.

I still haven’t made it to Zahav; I’ve twice had reservations and had to cancel, once for work (still mad), once because of illness. I’ve been to Double Knot, but only for happy hour, which is a different menu than dinner but still very good. I haven’t been to Laurel, Friday Saturday Sunday, Noord eetcafe, or Serpico. I can’t eat at South Philly Barbacoa, and I’m not paying what Vetri Cucina is asking.

Places I’ve tried and didn’t like: Vernick Food & Drink (they sent out a dish that was actually burned, enough that I sent it back, which I almost never do), Res Ipsa (ordered a hot sandwich that arrived cold), Sate Kampar (spicy food, but not flavorful at all).

Finally, for coffee, Re-Animator is my favorite roaster in Philly, with Elixr second. I love the Menagerie coffee shop across the street from Farmicia, where they use Dogwood espresso and a few third-wave roasters from around the country for pourovers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: breakfast, italian cuisine, japanese cuisine, lebanese cuisine, mexican cuisine, pasta, philadelphia, pizza, ramen, rankings, vegan, vegetarian

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ March 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/10/18.

I had two posts for Insiders this week, with another one on Shohei Ohtani just posted this morning. One piece looked at potential #1 overall pick Casey Mize, a right-handed pitcher at Auburn who threw a no-hitter last night. I ranked potential impact prospects for the 2018 season, which differs from my top 100 ranking, which looks at prospects’ long-term expected value. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Smile, a new, light card game designed by Michael Schacht, best known for Zooloretto.

The paperback version of Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday! I’ll be at Twitter HQ that day, and will answer questions from readers via the site’s Q&A app. To submit a question, tweet it with the hashtag #smartbaseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Atlantic on a serial con man who bilked a dozen women out of $1 million by finding them on dating sites, establishing relationships with them, and then doing everything from using their credit cards to pawning their jewelry to stealing one woman’s passport and birth certificate.
Politico examines how the Obama administration’s decision to normalize relations with Myanmar may have led to the ongoing genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, many of whom now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The country, formerly known as Burma, made superficial moves towards democracy after decades of rule by a military junta, and the U.S. responded in kind by lifting sanctions, but in the process we never pushed for protections for threatened minorities, and still aren’t doing so.
The New York Times‘ news section remains excellent, as in this long profile of a once-promising dancer who ended up homeless in Manhattan, suffering from untreated mental illness. What the writer never seems to question or explore, however, is the link between the subject’s sexual abuse as a child and her mental illness as an adult.
Their opinion section remains a tire-fire, as anti-Arab troll Bari Weiss, who now writes for the NYT full-time, used a fake ‘antifa’ Twitter account as evidence for some point she was making.
Jane Coaston takes a long look for Vox at the current trial of several alt-right leaders for inciting violence in Charlottesville. Are they criminally liable for speech that the prosecution argues led to the death of Heather Heyer?
A new study in Science found that false news stories spread faster than true ones, because it’s more novel or interesting. They also found that bot accounts don’t spread false stories faster than true stories.
David Gorski, at Science-Based Medicine, goes long on the ‘unholy alliance’ in Texas between ultra-religious conservatives and anti-vaxxers to fight vaccine mandates under the bullshit guise of ‘choice.’ You have a choice not to give yourself medicine when you’re sick, because doing so only makes you an idiot. You do not have the choice to deny your children such treatments, nor do you have the choice to endanger vulnerable members of your community who can’t be vaccinated or who could die of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you live in Texas, speak up, assuming you’re not hospitalized with the mumps.
WIRED looks at our extremely vulnerable medical supply chain, as shown by how two hurricanes in Puerto Rico have led to a massive shortage of IV bags in the U.S. Too many drugs and supplies are made outside of the U.S., and, of course, the current Administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been unacceptable.
An upcoming trial in Virginia (just postponed to May) will test an anti-abortion tactic of trespassing in abortion clinics to harass and obstruct patients seeking abortions or other related health services. I wonder what would happen if the abortion clinic employees invoked Stand Your Ground laws and shot the trespassers.
Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love wrote a piece for the Players’ Tribune about suffering a panic attack and the good that talk therapy has done for him since then. If you have mental health issues that aren’t trauma-induced, cognitive behavioral therapy can be a wonderful solution, or a major part of the solution.
WNYC’s On the Media podcast did an episode on how various reporters and outlets cover white supremacists. Is giving such racists and cranks publicity only helping them find new members?
An 83-year-old herbalist is now on trial in California for killing a 13-year-old diabetic boy by giving him herbs instead of insulin. The story doesn’t say if the mother is charged, but she should be.
Sinclair Broadcasting is taking over more and more local stations, and they’re forcing news anchors to read promos that bash mainstream media and report on right-wing bugbears like terrorism rather than cover local news.
Vaccines: There’s an epidemic of oral cancer in men, caused by the HPV virus, which men can catch while performing oral sex. The point of the article isn’t to tell me to make like Fat Joe, but to encourage parents to get their sons the HPV vaccine.
StatNews looks back at Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine. He died 25 years ago this week and was lauded in his time for refusing to patent the new vaccine, thus making it cheap and affordable for patients around the world. With news that Nigeria appears to have gone a year without any new cases of polio, the disease’s wild form appears to be once again endemic in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and nowhere else.
Natural News, a pseudoscience site that trashes valid medicine so Mike Adams can sell you a bunch of useless supplements, was kicked off Youtube after posting videos arguing that the Parkland shooting survivors were just ‘crisis actors.’
GlobalNews looks at the spreading measles outbreak in Europe, which the authors trace back to the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (it doesn’t, no vaccines cause autism, and Wakefield fabricated the data).
Chefs and cooks are notorious for adopting a lifestyle that can be harmful to their long-term health. Kat Kinsman interviewed eleven chefs about their self-care routines.
The short documentary “Heroin(e),” which you can watch on Netflix, looks at three women in Huntington, West Virginia, the ‘overdose capital’ of the United States, who are trying to fight the tide of overdoses and opioid addiction. Vanity Fair looks at the film and story behind it.
High St. on Market is my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and now three alumni of the all-day café, built around their amazing house-made breads, are opening a new BYOB dinner-only restaurant called Cadence on the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold reviews the reopened Copenhagen restaurant Noma, often ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
The Irish Times looks at former billionaire Chuck Feeney, who gave his entire fortune to charity, mostly through his own foundation, which has wound itself down by using its endowment.
An ACLU-backed lawsuit accusing Kansas Klown Kris Kobach of voter suppression began this past week; the suit argues that the policy he crafted unfairly disenfranchised thousands of Kansans, and could do the same to a few million American voters if the law spreads. Two things you can do to fight this: Vote against politicians pushing voter suppression under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” and get a passport.
Boardgame stuff: Designer Grant Rodiek argues that upcoming title Rising Sun is extremely important given the industry’s trend towards more complex games with overlong rulebooks or highly asymmetrical setups that can deter newbies to the hobby – and frankly just don’t have good designs.
Another designer, Bruno Faidutti (Citadels), writes about the flood of new releases every year and how it shrinks the selling windows for most games. I don’t think he has any answers, but his point, that 3000 new games a year probably isn’t sustainable for most publishers, is a real concern.
Restoration Games has updated its Design Diary for the upcoming Fireball Island, a reissue of a Milton Bradley title from 1986.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, con men, links, longreads, philadelphia, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 3, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/3/17.

My second first-round projection (mock draft) went up on Tuesday, and I held a Klawchat, in which some guy got mad at me for answering a question about my first-round projections by including that link, on Friday. It’s bad enough civility is dead, but must we continue to mutiliate its corpse?

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the light detective/puzzle game Watson & Holmes, yet another game that uses those public-domain characters strictly for marketing purposes. It’s not a bad game, though, just a little too simple.

I’m told that Smart Baseball continues to sell well, although the sales figures I get mean nothing to me (since it’s my first book), but it wouldn’t hurt if you bought a dozen more copies to give out for Father’s Day to … um … your twelve fathers. Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter as well.

And now, the links…

I tweeted this one earlier in the week but it’s worth a second boost: Child marriage is still legal in Florida and several other states. As I read the Delaware statute (note: I’m not a lawyer) I think it’s technically legal here too, whereas the author of that op ed is arguing for it to be explicitly banned.
A professor at Evergreen State College has been the target of protests and threats of violence for challenging a campus tradition that, this year, asked white students and faculty to leave campus in a day of forced segregation.
Tasting Table dissects the Philly staple, the roast pork sandwich, including the best of the breed, the version at High Street on Market, with house-made bread and fermented broccoli rabe.
Why is east Africa starving while corn silos in South Africa are overflowing? Because most African countries, including hard-hit Kenya, ban imports of GMO corn. Fear of science is actually killing people.
What is it about Haruki Murakami that mesmerizes people? I found his two best novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, to be just that – mesmerizing, like reading your way into a dream-state – but everything before and after those two has left me flat.
The Ringer talked to the four actors who played The Kids in season four of The Wire.
A study published last August found that some cases of ‘untreatable’ depression were tied to metabolic deficiencies and could be treated with supplements, some as common as folate.
Legendary tech writer Walter Mossberg, who spent many years as the technology reviewer-critic for the Wall Street Journal, is retiring and wrote his final column for Recode.
This Atlantic piece from a month ago is the best explanation I’ve found of ESPN’s layoffs and changing business model. Our revenues are driven by cable subscriptions, and as people cut cable, entirely or partially (me), it’s going to reduce the revenues of every cable station. So, no, this isn’t about the white nationalists’ claims that ESPN itself is a leftist entity.
Into the swamp: Jared Kushner used a federal loan program aimed at helping poor, job-starved areas to build a luxury skyscraper.
HHS Secretary Tom Price enriched himself by buying drug stocks and pushing policies to help those companies.
The Administration appointed Nantworks CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to a health information technology advisory committee. He has a history of rigging donations to fuel the money back to his company and accused media reporting on his company’s revenue troubles of pushing fake news.
Although this Washington Post story purports to discuss fake news coming from within the White House, I think the real message is how supporters of this Administration choose to believe only what they wish to believe. Anonymous sources are fine if they tell you what you wanted to hear; otherwise, they’re “fake news.” You see this with science deniers and conspiracy theorists (people who call themselves “truthers” withou a trace of irony) too.
“Auntie” Maxine Waters has become a hero to the online (so-called) resistance, but they are conveniently forgetting her history of corruption allegations.
How on earth did a prep school teacher work for four schools in six years despite accusations of sexual misconduct at three of them? Rhetorical question, of course: Schools didn’t and still don’t report this stuff to future employers.
The New York Times axed its ‘public editor’ this week and, really, when they run garbage this puff piece on “wellness” charlatan Amanda Chantal Bacon, it’s hard to understand what that person was doing in the first place.
An autistic writer penned this piece in February about the irresponsibility of speculation around whether Barron Trump is on the spectrum. I don’t think such speculation is remotely fair or warranted, but it resurfaced this week with the totally unverifiable story that Barron thought Kathy Griffin’s (offensive) photo of her holding a fake, bloody Trump head was real.
I thought this story about Melania Trump and the wife of the Israeli President was a rare glimpse into the humanity of someone who, fairly or not, is painted as a mere trophy wife.
Oklahoma’s budget crisis has many schools dropping to just four days a week of classes. Both Oklahoma and Kansas are run by far-right Republican Governors who’ve helped drive their states off the fiscal cliff, and who’ve widely expanded publicly-funded charter schools at the apparent expense of traditional public schools.
This seems like a big deal – the FDA just approved the first cancer-fighting drug tied to a specific biomarker in the tumor. Previous cancer drugs were all targeted to a type of cancer – lung, skin, blood – defined by its original location in the body.
I’ll end with this.

For some international perspective on the Paris Accord, this is from Australia's @theage. pic.twitter.com/lAnaxWKT1T

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 2, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: gmo, links, mental illness, murakami, philadelphia, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, the wire

→ February 7, 2016
→ By keith

Philly eats, February 2016 edition.

Standard reminder, since I’ve been asked this several times a day lately: The top 100 prospects package starts to roll out on Wednesday, February 10th, with the organizational rankings; the top 100 list itself follows on Thursday, with the org reports (including top tens) posting the following week.

I was both inspired and shamed by Philadelphia magazine’s latest list of the top 50 restaurants in Philly, since I live just 35 minutes away and had only been to three of the entries on the list: High Street on Market, Barbuzzo, and Osteria, which are all fantastic. I’m up to five now and would like to try to get to about half of the entries on the list by the end of 2016 (it’s down to 49 after Il Pittore closed in January), especially Laurel, Zahav, and Vedge, all nationally known establishments that are among Philly’s culinary stars.

Top Chef fans likely remember season 7 winner Kevin Sbraga – whose response to “You are Top Chef” was “I am?” – and his namesake restaurant, Sbraga, made the top 50. The menu is a $55 four-course prix fixe, very reasonable for the quality of food you’re getting, with plenty of options for each course to suit most diets. All meals start with a gruyère popover (outstanding) and foie gras soup (a little strongly flavored for my palate – the taste lingered for much of the meal). The menu changes frequently, but here’s what I had in my meal there at the end of January. For the first course, I got the hamachi crudo, served with thinly sliced honeydew, jicama, and coconut; the fish was as fresh as it gets, although I think it was a bit overpowered by the variety of other flavors on the plate. For the second course, which comprises pastas and a risotto, I went with the gnocchi with sunchokes, Brussels sprouts, and pine nuts, a dish that really worked when I could get every flavor in one bite – the sweetness of the sunchokes (a.k.a. Jerusalem artichokes), the faint bitterness of the sprouts, and the mixture of flavors in the well-browned gnocchi, although they could have been a little lighter in texture.

Course three is the proteins and this was where Sbraga kicked into high gear. I’m ridiculously picky about octopus – more than 90% of the times I’ve had octopus, it has been terrible, but I figured this was the kind of place that would do it justice. It’s cooked sous vide and finished on the grill, so the texture was perfect, and the restaurant’s version of piri piri – a chili pepper and lemon sauce that is kind of like a Portuguese chimichurri – was the ideal complement to the meaty but kind of neutral flavor of the octopus. The dessert option was a no-brainer – the mint cookie has a scoop of chocolate mousse sandwiched between two flat meringue cookies, topped with a quenelle of mint ice cream and a sprinkling of chocolate cookie crumbs. Both of the last two courses were memorable, the octopus for how it was cooked and the perfection of that sauce, the dessert because oh my God it’s like a Thin Mint on PEDs.

Late last week, my daughter and I went on a date to Brigantessa, a Southern Italian trattoria with wood-fired pizzas and house-made pastas in the Passyunk neighborhood of Philly, and another entry on the top 50. The biggest hit of the meal was the cappellaci dei briganti – hat-shaped pasta pieces – made with arugula pasta dough and served with a wild boar ragù that was everything you want a slow-cooked meat sauce to be. My daughter ended up eating about half of my plate, so I shared her margherita pizza (her standard order), which was solid; they’re using really good San Marzano tomatoes, because the sauce was bright and sweet and just a little tangy. I loved my appetizer, charred beets with salsa salmoriglio (which really is just an Italian chimichurri, swapping oregano in for the cilantro), grilled treviso, and toasted pistachios; if I’m really nitpicking, I’d say it could have used a dollop of the sheep’s milk ricotta that was on my daughter’s starter plate. Hers had that ricotta, prosciutto, pepitas, and a roasted and caramelized winter squash puree, but the cheese and squash were underseasoned, probably to compensate for the prosciutto. Even when I tasted everything at once it didn’t quite click, and my daughter, who has never met a cheese she didn’t like, ended up just crushing the prosciutto. As traditional as much of the menu is, the dessert menu is rather untraditional – not bad, necessarily, but not what we had in mind, so we passed. They have a nice menu of Italian beers that you don’t see everywhere else, including beers from Birrificio Italiano, a brewery located north of Milan near Lake Como.

I only managed to take advantage of Philadelphia Restaurant Week once, since I was sick for most of it, meeting a friend for lunch at FARMiCiA, a farm-to-table spot located right across from Menagerie Coffee and around the corner from High Street on Market. Farmicia’s lunch menu (I’m not going to bother with the weird capitalization again) is very straightforward, like diner fare done right, with way better ingredients and attention to detail. The roasted beets and kale salad was calling my name, even with its “veggie ricotta;” I’m not sure what that was made of, but the dressing on the dish was so flavorful that I didn’t mind the intrusion of the soy or nut “cheese” or whatever it was. The turkey and avocado club was enormous and not over-mayonnaised. The fries are freshly cut and properly fried. The desserts appear to have been specials for restaurant week; both my friend and I ordered the apple tart, which was … a good apple tart, although I hate when the pastry chef sneaks raisins into a dish, because, as John Oliver said, “no one fucking wants them there.”

Since I haven’t done a recent Philly eats post, I’ll just mention some of my other favorites that aren’t cited above: Pizzeria Vetri is my go-to date place with my daughter – we went tonight, in fact – and while everything is good, I’m very partial to the sausage and fennel pizza because I’ve never had fennel that good. That’s our favorite pizza in Philly, and Pizzeria Stella is second; Stella has some pasta options if you’re going with some freak who doesn’t like pizza. I mentioned Menagerie Coffee, a very cool space that uses Dogwood Coffee’s Neon blend for its espresso and rotates in various micro-roasters for its pourovers. I also love the local roaster Re-Animator, now with one location near center city plus the original in Fishtown. High Street on Market is still my go-to spot for breakfast or lunch, especially when I want to impress someone; you can’t go wrong with their Forager breakfast sandwich, or just with anything involving their amazing breads. El Vez tries a little too hard to be hip, but I was impressed by their guacamoles, both the variety and the freshness. I’m sure there’s better Mexican to be had – everyone raves about Lolita, which is owned by the same team that runs Barbuzzo (get the gnocchi and the salted caramel budino), Jamonera, and Bud & Marilyn’s, but that’s still on my to-do list.

I haven’t done many brunch spots in Philly, but we all liked the Farmacy in West Philadelphia, which offers a build-your-own Benedict and a lot of crazy twists on breakfast classics. No trip to Philly is complete without a stop at the Reading Terminal Market and a pork sandwich with broccoli rabe and provolone at Dinic’s. And for reasons I can’t quite explain, I liked the Big Gay Ice Cream shop down here better than the one I tried in Manhattan (which was the original location, I think). My daughter and I were in a bookstore in Philly recently, and I’d promised to take her to the BGIC afterwards, but she confused her favorite dish there with the name of the place and said in a fairly loud voice, “I wanna go to the Salty Pimp!”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, pasta, philadelphia, pizza, prix fixe, top chef

→ October 22, 2013
→ By keith

Pizzeria Vetri and Barbuzzo (Philly eats, part one).

Today’s Behind the Dish podcast featured physics professor Alan Nathan plus my thoughts on the World Series and the two Cuban free agents who just signed.

I’ve now had two meals at Pizzeria Vetri, the latest outpost of the Vetri family empire of Philly restaurants (including Vetri and Osteria), and am thoroughly impressed by their authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas and commitment to simple recipes with a handful of fresh ingredients. The pizzas come with the appropriate char on the exterior, moderate air bubbles in the exterior crust, and enough interior crust to hold together but not enough to support the weight of the toppings (which is correct, oddly enough). That exterior crust was softer than some other authentic Neapolitan pizzerias I’ve tried, but it was a net positive as it didn’t become tough once it cooled.

The margherita is dominated by the bright, sweet flavor of San Marzano tomoates, with huge basil leaves and a few dollops of fresh mozzarella, light enough that my daughter, age 7, could eat five of the six slices and still have room for dessert. I preferred the crudo, with prosciutto crudo, mozzarella di bufala, and shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, which had better balance across all the flavors with a slightly salty profile from the meat and the hard cheese, but the crusts on both were very good and cooked perfectly from char to center.

Vetri also offers a rotating special of Silician-style pizza (thicker crust, cooked in a sheet pan), which often reflects the chef’s caprices on that particular day. For our last visit, the “pizza al taglio” (pizza by the slice) special was roasted quince that had been cooked with red wine, along with fresh herbs including rosemary, and mozzarella and shaved pecorino romano. It was peculiar, a little like a wine-and-cheese course on top of a thick pizza crust, but the sharp crunch of the crust was the main selling point of the slice, with a little dose of olive oil like the underside of a good focaccia (which is pretty much Sicilian pizza dough cooked without toppings).

Vetri’s non-pizza offerings are limited, but they do include a Caesar salad and a “wood-fired” salad, the latter coming with roasted corn, green beans, and chanterelles, along with a generous portion of sliced prosciutto cotto and some Microplaned ricotta salata. With a drizzle of olive oil and a hint of vinegar, it’s an earthy mixture bound by the powerful umami notes of the roasted chanterelles and sweetness of the corn, and far more satisfying than I’d expect an item in the salad section of the menu to be. Vetri also offers a few dessert items and my daughter would like you to know that the fior di latte (sweet cream) soft-serve ice cream is the best soft-serve she’s ever had, although I warn you her affections can be fickle.

—

My daughter also accompanied me to Barbuzzo earlier this month, a restaurant I’d wanted to visit since coming across their salted caramel budino recipe in Bon Appetit several years ago; I’ve made them four or five times and wanted to compare my results to the real thing. Aside from a small lapse in service, the entire experience was superb, with some huge highlights from the savory part of the menu.

The kale salad was the surprise hit of the meal for me, featuring thinly sliced ribbons of dino kale (a.k.a. Cavolo nero or Tuscan kale or lacinato, it’s all the same damn leaf) tossed in a pistachio pesto dressing, served over a few slices of roasted red and yellow beets with soft goat cheese. I find kale an incredibly versatile ingredient, pairing up well with other flavors from across the spectrum, from bacon to nuts to cranberries or pomegranate arils, so I wasn’t shocked that it played well with pistachio, but was shocked by how much body the pistachios gave to the entire salad; kale can be a little tough, and a little bitter, but the broad coating of the dressing reduced the feeling that this was just a pile of leaves. The only problem with the dish is that the menu refers to it as a roasted beet salad when that is maybe the third or fourth ingredient on the list; this is a kale salad, plus some beets and goat cheese.

Although the various pizzas on the menu were hard to ignore with the wood-fired oven right in my line of sight, I went with the server’s suggestion of the pan-seared gnocchi with bacon, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes, with no sauce but the slight glaze of the bacon fat. The gnocchi were the lightest I’ve ever eaten, strong enough to hold a brown crust from the searing but light enough that an entire plateful was more like an appetizer than a full entree (so it’s a good thing I was full of kale salad by that point). They were powerful bacon-infused pockets that crushed all other comers, the rare example of a plate delivering a bacon punch without delivering a similar blow to your gut. My daughter was satisfied with the burrata plate with several kinds of fresh tomatoes, nut-free pesto, and sliced onions along with a serving of grilled country bread (an add-on for $2), all of which was fresh across the board, even the tomatoes, which surprised me with their sweetness given the time of year.

The dessert … well, the salted caramel budino didn’t quite live up to expectations; the recipe may have changed, but there’s nothing tangy in the version I make at home, whereas something in the mason jar I received at Barbuzzo was, possibly due to the incorporation of crème fraiche somewhere along the line. I can’t say mine is better, since it’s their recipe, but I prefer it without that sour note. My daughter ordered the apple raisin bread pudding with bourbon sauce and malted buttermilk gelato, which tasted strongly of bourbon and, not surprisingly, which she loved. The only real complaint I had about the meal was the 15-minute lag between when we ordered dessert and when it arrived; to a seven-year-old, or her anxious father, that’s a long time. The bread pudding had clearly just come out of the oven, though – it was practically in flames when it reached the table – and their expediter was otherwise on the ball as everything reached the table quickly and at the right temperature. I’d love to go back and sample other parts of the menu, including the pizzas, the other house-made pastas, and the wild mushroom bruschetta and sheep’s milk ricotta starters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: dessert, gnocchi, highly recommended, philadelphia, pizza, salad

→ July 23, 2013
→ By keith

Trio (Philadelphia).

When I mentioned that I was moving to Delaware, reader Andrew reached out to me to invite me to the restaurant he manages in Philadelphia, Trio, among the city’s best-reviewed Thai restaurants, with a menu that includes a few influences from outside of Thailand along with traditional Thai items. The meal was superb, and my wife (who loves Thai food but rarely has it due to a shellfish allergy) and daughter (who’s a pretty good eater, but didn’t like Thai food the first time she tried it) both enjoyed their meals tremendously.

For starters, my wife ordered the vegetarian spring rolls, which included shiitake mushrooms along the julienned cabbage and onions in the filling, and were fried perfectly and served extremely hot. These also formed a significant part of my daughter’s dinner once she stopped complaining about the temperature (and we pointed out that she could actually wait a second before trying to eat them … she inherited her patience from her father). I ordered one of the special items, a strawberry gazpacho with jicama, avocado, and chili peppers, a little on the sweet side for me but with a good balance of acid and heat underneath the natural sweetness of the berries.

My entree choice was the crispy roast duck, a standard menu item with a sauce accompaniment that changes frequently; on Saturday the sauce was a lychee-cherry concoction, sweet and tangy, but barely necessary given how amazing the duck was. The breast meat was cooked just past medium, not dry but not still quacking, which is how I prefer it, while the skin was crispy without any grease and allowed the natural sweetness of the skin to shine through. My daughter loves duck as well and helped me pick the bones clean, while she also dipped everything she could into the sauce on my plate, including the duck and the lemongrass pork meatballs she stole from my wife’s pad thai. Those meatballs were outstanding, incredibly aromatic with lemongrass, onion, and (I believe) ginger, while the sauce on the noodles themselves was less sweet than the pad thai I typically get on the rare occasions I order the dish at Thai restaurants. (I avoid it because it seems to be the most “Americanized” dish at such places, made sweeter for U.S. palates, but losing me in the process.) My daughter didn’t love her own entree, a basil fried rice dish that had a strong cumin flavor and some surprising late heat that I thought was excellent but was a little too spicy for her.

The dessert menu is more eclectic, reflecting the owner’s current interest in Mexican cuisine (he’s also a pastry chef, and owns the small Mexican restaurant Isobel on the same street as Trio). My daughter inhaled her tres leches cake with homemade marshmallow sauce, while my wife and I split a chocolate-hazelnut mousse with an Oreo crust … and I might point out that the mousse and the marshmallow sauce also went together very well.

Trio is BYOB, and the place is fairly small so I’d recommend a reservation for a weekend. It’s a wonderful spot, and it was a nice treat for me to have Thai food with the family, made possible because the staff was so good about dealing with our unfortunate (especially for a Thai restaurant) allergies. Full disclosure – the meal was comped, although I left a tip for about 50% of what the bill would have been.

The meal at Trio finished off a day in Philly for three of us that began at Shake Shack – the first experience there for my wife and daughter; my daughter loved their grilled cheese while my wife and I split a fair trade coffee shake that tasted like real coffee – and included several hours at the amazing Please Touch Museum, the main children’s museum in Philly, with a few fun exhibits of vintage toys that made my wife and me feel very, very old. I did get a kick out of the displays of Easy-Bake Ovens throughout their history (as well as some knockoffs; my daughter couldn’t name a single room as her favorite, but she enjoyed the art room, the small rock-climbing wall, and the astronomy/rockets room, where kids launch foam rockets off air guns to try to put them through hoops hanging from the ceiling.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, philadelphia, thai cuisine

→ September 5, 2009
→ By keith

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: breakfast, coffee, cookies, dessert, gelato, highly recommended, ice cream, philadelphia, soul food, westchester

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