Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Here's a voice from the Peanut Gallery (Los Angeles). On the West Side, Pho 99 at 11819 Wilshire Blvd, has excellent Banh Mi for about $4.95, delicious Pho, and many other Vietnamese dishes well prepared at low prices. Pleasant atmosphere with attractive art on the walls. Accommodating waiters, who take substitutions helpfully (noodles instead of rice in some standard dishes).
Don't be put off by seeming distance; it's their newly growing command of English that makes THEM uncomfortable. With a few seconds of effort they warm up and become quite friendly. And any back-and-forth when asking for substitutions is not reluctance, but an attempt to get your request clear in their mind despite any possible language barrier.

I've eaten there several times a month. Recently I was under the weather and their chicken soup Pho was a life-saver. it's not just from Jewish mothers.

The hamburger was great--pricey at $16, but great...!!

i guess the establishment must have thought long and hard about adding on the gratuity -- probably because staff was getting stiffed..... so, it wouldn't bother me.... and like @johannabanana said above, if you have sub-par service, bring it up with the manager....

To me that is just part of the brunch price, I don't care what they call it, a "service charge," a "watch your car so it doesn't get stolen" charge, a "it's a sunny day so we decided to charge extra" charge ... at least you don't have to worry about tipping there.

no way - if i get poor service, i should be able to tip lower. i don't think i've ever had service so bad i've not tipped altogether, but i think it can be justified (though very, very rarely).

While we're on the topic of misspellings, it's hua jiao not hua jio.

Joe, I apologize about getting the name wrong. Inexcusable. Saying this, I think your piece will do wonders for Lan Sheng

Good eye. In neither the signage nor the take-out menu is there the letter "g" in the name. I suspect it is a typo—probably the hurried spelling of a harried editor, as DiStefano uses the correct spelling of the restaurant's name throughout his review.

(I however misspelled DiStefano's name on three occasions, a sloppiness I apologize for, and can only blame on the hour in which I wrote my response.)

I will miss Gourmet. I was wondering where my request to resubscribe was. Now I know. I recreated many of the recipes using affordable ingredients with great results. Substituting worked for me and my meals were not expensive. I was reading my local newspaper and boom there it was. Gourmet trashed. I could not believe it. Sure it had it's share of problems, but what publication doesn't. I am glad epicurious is still around though. Well thank goodness for Bon Appetit and Food and Wine. I subscribe to other food magazines also so there will be one less in the mailbox for my husband to complain about.

Well since this is the first I've heard of Gourmet closing down so I am rather shocked. I suppose that in the effort not to have too many advertisements they were rather doomed. My subscription is up in a few months so I'm just lucky in that respect.

Not to be mean here but I suspect that there are not enough people out there that truly do love food so the politics of food and the planet is just not interesting. Which I find rather odd because with out the planet there is no food and without food… you get the picture.
I love a good recipe just as well as the next person but if an ingredient will destroy a chunk of rain forest then I can do without it, that kind of stuff I would like to know.

I don't think its being a snob to say chicken stock or any stock made from scratch is best and that each and every meat dish does not have to have cheese or the ingredient du jour.

There were issues of Gourmet that I would flag most of the magazine and there were issues where I could careless. I don’t know of any magazine that hits the mark each and every time with each and every reader.

I hate the glossy ads as well as everyone else but in reality that is the advertisers fault not the magazines. The truth is that all magazines are just whores for the advertisers.

With all that said, I would think that the owners would have looked into why they had to have all of their staff needing salaries that would allow them to live in Manhattan. Perhaps that may have been one of the problems. Food and the Internet are everywhere so why only use writers in NY??

I will miss the magazine and will be sorry to see it go, I do so loved those food pictures on the covers.

i will definitely miss it. people who complain about ruth's direction in the mag tend to not appreciate the all-encompassing approach she brought in — i always loved reading every issue how someone would moan about how they don't want to read about the politics of their food, or how there's too many vegetarian recipes in the magazine now, on and on. well, guess what? food IS political, and the vegetarian plate tends to be the healthier one. deal with it!

i have learned so much from my subscription, and i will continue to learn from back issues. for instance, my next culinary mountain to climb is making your own mozzarella. i'm nervous and excited about the prospect, and this sort of thing is something you would never read about in bon appetit. i will not be subscribing to another food magazine for a long, long time from the looks of it.

I think the premise of the piece, that there should be a surcharge specifically for benefits that eliminates tipping, is extremely troubling. I don't know any other business that expects its customers to pay for its employees' health insurance, other than through the company's profit margin on its products. So, raise the prices on the food, if you like, and cover your health coverage costs that way, but allow the waiters to do what they want with the tips that they earn.

I think the whole idea of tipping is ridiculous: do you tip the toll collector for taking your money? Do you tip the gas man for reading your meter? Do you tip your IT guy for fixing your computer? Of course not. Now, obviously, they don't live on tips. GUESS WHAT: NEITHER SHOULD WAITERS! How insane is it that a customer has to pay basically twice: for the food and for the service? Can you imagine if we had to tip UPS person for delivering the package to your house? Here's another tidbit: are the dishes heavier at T.G.I. Fridays than they are in a fancy steakhouse with $100+ dishes? Where do you come off with a sense of entitlement to a $20 tip just because the food was $100, whereas at Fridays a $20 plate would only get a $4 tip? If restaurant you work at charges that much for food, let them pay you! Enough is enough!