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Au Bon Pain has vegan options - there's always at least one soup of the day that's vegan, the black bean burger is vegan, and they can tell you which of the bread options for said burger are vegan. Plus the salads and wraps are all customisable if you wait in line rather than grab 'n' go (note: I do not know if there are dairy ingredients in the flatbread). I miss Au Bon Pain - nothing nearly so good where I currently work.

The more yuppie the fast food, the more likely they have vegan options, largely on the back of "salad assembled in front of you!", and sometimes soup. Thus Chipotle, Panera, Au Bon Pain, Pret à Manger (not assembled in front of you, but they usually have a couple vegan options among the salads), all the salad places (Chop't is spreading across the major metro areas of the mid-Atlantic seaboard, I think; Sweetgreen is expanding Philly-direction from DC, too). Most of the food trucks have at least a vegetarian option, some of which are also vegan. Fast casual, yuppie, you'll survive. Low end, true "fast food", that seems to be the difficulty.

Is the American pronunciation a crappy pronunciation key, some regional dialect that got slightly mangled after a couple generations in the US, or a straight-up Americanism? Because that's not anything close to the vowel sound in Polish, and I don't think that vowel sound exists in Polish.

Proper pronunciation should be closer to "paunch-key", only sort of without the N, that sort of French nasal thing. Right? (Asks the girl who barely managed introductory Polish, but that was the lack of vowels and getting lost in the noun declensions; where there were vowels, I could totally pronounce the words *g*.)

@katiekathleen: If your liquor store carries Rojo Mojo, from Spain, it's roughly equivalent to the Yellow Tail blends for a couple bucks cheaper in my area. ($6 for rojo mojo rather than $7.50 or $8 for Yellow Tail - yes, it's horribly overpriced). They've got a straight tempranillo that I usually buy, but the shiraz/tempranillo blend is pretty good, too. Definitely table wine, but likely to be a crowd pleaser (and at this price point, that $2 per bottle difference makes an extra bottle pretty quickly).

This coming from someone who drank a lot of Yellow Tail, Black Swan, and Black Opal shiraz and shiraz blends until priced out by the move to a different county (and no longer drinking on the roommate's dime, if I'm honest).

Alcohol pricing is fascinating, isn't it? I think the Yellow Tail reserves were going for $11 or so, a price point that covers a wide variety of smaller producer options in the same county store. At that point, I can sometimes get a local wine!

@rationallcthus: Wacky weed?

More seriously, I get it. It's like twinkies - you know in your heart it's supposed to be disgusting, but sometimes you just need it, and there should be no shame in it. A nice sponge cake with real whipped cream is going to do absolutely nothing for you when you want a twinkie.

Whatever Qdoba is trying to pass off here, however, that's just scary. I don't need my burrito bowl to be all wet. (And I do like Qdoba for their taco salads - reasonable amount of food at a reasonable price, not too high in fat or sodium when you don't eat the fried tortilla bowl, and walking distance from my apartment. All of these being important considerations as to why I don't eat more from Baja Fresh - it's further away than the Qdoba and the Chipotle.)

Hit up the Columbia Road Flower Market on a Saturday morning for something both local and touristy - cool little shops, lots of cafés and stalls I wish I could have stopped in for a bite to eat (the friend I was with is type 1 diabetic, so no just popping in anywhere), there's a dairy and it's just all around off the usual tourist track and was great fun to wander around and look at the stalls selling everything from lemon trees to cut flowers to potted herbs. We did get to try Treacle, a nice little cupcake and kitchen gift shop with really nice cakes (we purchased minis to takeaway and eat with lunch). Nearest tube is probably Old Street, on the Northern Line.

I used mine (different recipe) as a soup base - dumped in some beans, some pozole, a bit of leftover pork, and some leftover tomatillo salsa along with some freshly sauteed onions, garlic, and (possibly?) chili peppers. Worked fine. Different time, different recipe leftover as a base but this would surely work: sauteed onions, garlic, chili peppers, then sausage (I was using a chicken cilantro variety), pozole, and swiss chard wilted into the soup. Used too many chili peppers that time, so it ended up having to get diluted with a lot of chicken stock, but the basic idea was tasty.

Poor baby in the Cone of Shame! Though I'm sure the Fritos do a lot to take his mind off it.

Yes! McNuggets *require* honey. And so do chicken nuggets at home, out of a box from the freezer case. And then you can dip your fries in your honey, then in the ketchup (but not the other way around, otherwise you end up with ketchup on your nuggets, and that's just nasty).

Wendy's has better nuggets, though. And they have good honey mustard. Yeah, I said it.

Emily looks pretty much like my mental image, but I admit I picture Will more frequently having a several day growth of beard, possibly to better fit in when purchasing some of the scarier things he's tested for our pleasure :)

And now I want cookies.

Your other problem is thinking about cost in retail rather than restaurant terms. If the place is selling wine by the glass at $15, you ain't gonna find nothin' there for $30 a bottle. You can get a can of soda for $.75 from the vending machine, so should the restaurant not charge you $2?

I'm not really seeing the problem, as while I usually prefer to keep to $9 or $10 a glass, $12 is not unreasonable for me to spend, and depending on the restaurant and size/quality of wine list, I'm not batting an eye at $15.

I am still taken aback by the rise in candy bar prices, though, so with a little more information (like in what way the $15 was shocking), I might better see where you're coming from.

Do you have the Jewish buses in Boston, or is that just a DC to NY thing? Not that I ever get the Jew bus, as they don't run on the Sabbath, and Saturdays are usually a lot more convenient for me. They apparently drive like bats out of hell on Friday afternoons in order to get there before sundown, but other than that, superior to the Chinatown buses.

Those were the options in the days before Bolt and Mega and DC2NY. I love you, BoltBus.

Oh, and poor Nelson, having this crap named after him!

Tom Sietsema was never thrilled with Brabo, but it's probably fine. I know he'd steer you to one of Cathal Armstrong's restaurants instead in Old Town. (I read all the chats.)

Check his review here - it's a couple years old, yes, but it highlights the disconnect between Brabo and Beck.

Obviously, read the review, then head to Yelp and compare, and see if you think you'll be satisfied or not. (and remember when looking at Tom's reviews that 2 stars means "good" and is a very common rating at all price points/cuisine types. A restaurant can be perfectly satisfactory below that, depending on your taste/expectations.)