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I believe Melinda when she touts her own homemade English muffins, but for those of us not so ambitious, there is only one English muffin, Thomas' They are the standard by which all others pale in comparison. However, I have noticed a slight, barely discernible, yet still evident, decline in the texture of Thomas' since George Weston bakeries took them over. I hope this trend does not continue, or else I may be forced to bake my own, as Melinda does. (By the way, I hate to be judgmental, Melinda, and your lifestyle choices are your own, but advertising the fact that you live with your boyfriend outside of marriage in a public column is setting a very bad example for your younger readers. This used to be called "living in sin" for a reason. So live the way you want, but please keep it to yourself. Your living arrangements have no impact on the quality of your English muffins, one way or the other.)

My standard for home fries has always been those served in diners in New Jersey. That is why I'm always disappointed when they are cut into chunks instead of slices. The diners always cut slices about a quarter-inch thick, the entire diameter of the potato. They are about the size of silver dollars, only twice as thick. For some reason, the texture and "mouth feel" of potatoes sliced this way for home fries makes them extra good. Every time I'm back in New Jersey (now live in Florida) I go to a diner and order a Taylor ham and egg sandwich on a hard roll with a side order of home fries. And, of course, a "cup o' CAWfee"! :)

Before visiting Italy, I would have laughed at this question? But, at a sidewalk café on Capri, right off Napoli, the birthplace of pizza, they actually served my quattro stagioni (four seasons) pizza on a china plate, complete with silverware!

(However, when we got pizza at a food court in a mall in Genoa, they served it on a paper plate without silverware, the way Americans do.)

But still, as a native of New Jersey and also a former resident of Manhattan, eating pizza with a knife and fork goes against my nature. The traditional way to eat a slice of New York pizza, especially from one of those windows that opens onto the sidewalk, where you eat your pizza standing up, is to 1) Grasp the slice near the outer crust, with ring finger and thumb under the crust, and index finger and middle finger on top of the crust, all fingers pointing toward the point. 2.) Exert downward pressure with the index and middle finger, and upward pressure with the thumb and ring finger, forcing the slice to fold in half, lengthwise, from point to rim. 3) Eat from the point towards the wide end. Notice that all this can be done with only one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold your drink, napkin, etc. This is an art equivalent to folding one's newspaper into narrow columns for reading on the subway! New Yorkers are masters of doing everything quickly, efficiently, and under trying circumstances. :)

I lived in Los Angles County for 2-1/2 years in the early 90s and I was totally UNimpressed with In-N-Out. To me, they represented the excesses of the Southern California culture of the post-War period.

I much preferred another Southern California icon, Carl's, Jr. Carl's, with roots going back to the Depression, featured menu offerings that were much more restrained. (Although, in recent years, they and partner Hardee's have also succumbed to greed and are contributing the the national obesity epidemic.) As a native of the Northeast, to me a hamburger should be a charbroiled piece of beef on a bun. Period. No lettuce, no tomatoes, no special sauces, (Especially nothing nicknamed "animal style"!) Carl's Old Fashioned Star burger fit the bill nicely. I also like their chargrilled chicken breast with Anaheim pepper on a bun as an alternative to a hamburger.

I must comment on a comment: "No one said that you have to make a friend, tell your life history, or donate an organ... it's just nice and polite, and for crying out loud its a FIRST NAME people. Whatever happened to being nice and using good common sense manners?"

I find this trend of store employees addressing customers by their first names to be overly familiar and disrespectful. When I worked in a cheese shop at the age of 18, all of our customers' first names were Mr., Mrs., Sir, or Ma'am. If they must use a name, it should be both title and surname, not FIRST name. For a waiter to call a customer by his/her first name (unless invited to do so) is BAD manners. I invite the poster to purchase a copy of any good etiquette book.

I turned 60 this year and spent my childhood years in Bergen County, New Jersey during the 1950s and '60s. There were several ice cream trucks that came around in summer, including the Good Humor man. Those little white trucks had bells mounted above the windshields which the driver operated by pulling a string. None of today's annoying music blasting over loudspeakers! The ice cream bars were kept in freezers in the back of the truck and the driver opened these really thick doors and had to reach way in to get your Popsicle or chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar. (All 10 cents.) There were hardly any chain "fast food" places unless you counted Dairy Queens, which in those days had only soft ice cream, sered at walk-up windows. My friends and I went to a soda fountain in either a drug store or Mom and Pop candy store to get Cokes for either 5 or 10 cents, made by squirting Coke syrup into a paper, cone-shaped cup held by a stainless steel holder, then they would fill the cup with seltzer and stir it up with a spoon. We kids earned our spending money by bringing soda bottles back to the sore for a 2-cent deposit on small bottles and 10 cents on the large. If we were lucky enough to find a quart-sized beer bottle, we could return it to the liquor store for 10 cents! Ice cream sodas and milk shakes were 25 cents and a malted was 30 cents. They would give you the stainless steel mixer cup and it would fill a standard sized Coca Cola glass about three times. Ice cream cones were ten cents.

The local lunch counters cooked their hamburgers on the grill but sometimes my grandfather would take me to a highway place called Sandy's Charcoal Hearth for a really good char-broiled burger. Naturally, after tasting these, I was completely unimpressed with the McDonald's variety, which I first tried around 1965 when fast food places started invading Bergen County, much to the chagrin of the older residents who appreciated much better food — and service.

They had a chain called Dugan's "Bakers for the Home" in the NY metro area and their trucks would visit your neighborhood two or three times a week. They carried Entenmann's-quality baked goods. Milk men? Of course! We had a metal milk box and the milk man would bring us four quarts of milk every other day. (Five kids in the family.) My Mom also bought more milk during her weekly shopping trip, which sold for around 25 cents a quart.

I was lucky living in Hackensack, New Jersey up until 1958 because we were within walking distance of what many people consider to be one of the finest bakeries on Earth. The B&W (Boehringer & Weimer) bakery. Their specialty was the real New Jersey-style crumb cakes, where the cake is about an inch high and the crumbs on top are thicker than the cake! They also sold very good 7-layer and Neapolitan cakes with butter cream icing so rich it tasted like chocolate or vanilla flavored butter! Their brownies, with chocolate icing and walnuts, were only 8 cents apiece!

As an 18-year-old in 1966, I started visiting New York's Greenwich Village, where I tried such "exotic" fare as cappuccino and bagels for the first time!

Quote: "The huarache, sort of like a Mexican version of pizza, ..." At least the Mexicans have enough creativity to give their dish an original name — unlike that other abomination found in Chicago, so-called deep-dish "pizza." If that non-Italian (and, therefore, interloper in the pizza business) named Ike had had the decency to call his creation "deep-dish tomato, cheese, and bread casserole," there would be no problem. But to call it pizza is an insult to real Neapolitan pizza.

Each city/region has its strong points (and I lived 22 years in the New York area and 17 in Massachusetts). New York has much better bread and rolls (New England Italian and French bread and bulkie rolls are just different shapes of Wonder Bread!) I also never once found a decent chocolate cake in either a bakery or a restaurant there; they don't know how to make a decent milk chocolate, butter cream icing. And, in general, New York has better pizza, although Boston Pizzeria Regina is very good. Both do an equally good job with beef and good French food. Where New England excels, however, is with sea food. After 17 years in New England, I cannot eat seafood anywhere else without being disappointed! Great chowder, and in particular, fried clams.

Has anyone else noticed that blue cheese taste amazingly like the powder-like corrosion that forms around the posts in an automobile battery? (How do I know? When blowing the particles off the battery they become airborne and inhaling just a particle or two produces an acidic, metallic taste in the back of one's throat! Much like the taste of blue cheese.)

Quote: "Griddled Patties: The burgers are made on a tiny flat-top griddle in an impossibly small kitchen area."

That does it for me right there. I'd never walk in the door of this place. In my opinion (and I've cooked thousands of hamburgers as a restaurant cook and backyard griller) and eaten tens of thousands, it is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to cook a halfway decent — much less excellent — hamburger on a "flat-top griddle." Good hamburgers must be charbroiled (or charcoal broiled). A gas char-broiler is alright, but the key is that FLAMES must lick at the hamburger, imparting the characteristic charred exterior and smoky flavor. No flames, no hamburger worth eating. End of story.

I am opposed to the thinking behind this article. The object of a good "grilled" (I prefer, charcoal-broiled — on the BARBECUE — not grill) hamburger is to make it taste as much as possible like a charbroiled steak, not just another hamburger. I've found that frozen beef patties work best, and should be cooked while still frozen. This way, the outside has adequate time to get good and charred before the inside overcooks. The idea is to have the outside dark brown with coal-black stripes while the interior remains strawberry ice cream pink. And squish I do, because the fat squeezes out and hits the coals, making the flames leap high and sear the burger. I don't try to PREVENT "flare-ups," I ENCOURAGE them! Flare-up-free charbroiling is for wimps! That's also why I turn the patty and turn it again, and again, to provide plenty of fat for the fire and to burn all the excess fat off the hamburger. By following my advice, you will produce a hamburger like the Fireplace on Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey, which sells the best hamburgers in the world. Another good contender was the old York Steak Houses which I don't think are still around. (They had lousy steak but great hamburgers. If they had changed their name to York Hamburgers, they might have survived.)