Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

It depends on the side dishes.

Fois Gras sauteed in madeira wine.

the Balkan-Armenian Restaurant on East 30th Street.

Smokey's (the original on Ninth Avenue, not the two lesser versions), which introduced NYC to slow-cooked barbecue).

Herr's makes a potato chip that claims to use real Heinz ketchup in the flavoring, making it an all-Pennsylvania product, I guess. While it doesn't taste horrible, the bag sure did seem to last a long time, if you know what I mean. Glenny's American Fries sounds awful, though.

Green River Barbecue, Saluda, NC!

Please don't.

As angry as I am at the Bush Administration at their ongoing failure to help the people (as opposed to the businesses) of New Orleans, I believe that Ms. Chase did the right thing here. She is not a politician, she runs a business, a restaurant that offers fine dining to all. To expect her to endanger the future of her establishment to make a political statement is unfair. What would be appropriate, however, would be for others to point out the irony of the Bush visit, with Ms. Chase in her trailer, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents displaced from their homes, and violent crime ubchecked in the streets of the city. Ms. Chase's graciousness in the face of these realities should be commended, not condemned.

Western North Carolina, after 48 years in New York. No lookin' back, either. We have a Fresh Market store here, the same chain where you've seen the Top Chef contestants shopping, so I didn't feel completely cut-off from high-quality foods. And there's a Whole Foods clone called Earth Fare nearby.

A pear tree.

Andrea just learned one of the sad realities of the web. By makiing yourself visible you've made yourself a target. And there's nothing like a little envy to make things worse. The hostility expereinced in the last week or so by both Andrea and RG (I can still call her that, right?) is just good old-fashioned jealousy.

I certainly don't prretend to know whether RG can pull this off, but it should be fun to watch. She's a decent enough writer, and she has, IMHO, enough knowledge about food to do the job. Whether she understands that her role has changed now that she works for the DN is another question, as is whether she is already fatally compromised as a critic because of her visibility and her professional relationships with many chefs and dining establishments. I think its an interesting experiment and I hope she can bring a meaningful new approach to food writing. Certainly the ruse of the surprise visit from the unknown or disguised critic has become a tired cliche (c.f., the woman with the big droopy hat and the oversized sunglasses. Hi, Gael.).

Seyo, people were offering similar laments 20, 50, even 100 years ago. The nature of NYC is that it is always changing. Unlike London or Paris, it does not treasure its connections to the past. And in the "good old days" that people always seek there was a lot of suffering and deprivation. Rent control and stabilization slowed the rate of change in from the Seventies to the Nineties, but once they began to disappear it was only a matter of time. And I really hope you're being facetious in wishing for an economic depression or a crime wave. People suffer and die in those situations. The New York you're longing for, the one in which I lived most of my life, is gone.