Urban Wit

Saw this van in NYC last weekend. I assume that the owner of the van (seen sleeping in the front passenger seat) is not responsible for the witticism scrawled in permanent marker on the side of it.

Ralphs Ices

It's been a long time since I went to Ralphs Ices, far too long. Going to Ralphs is the kind of thing I should do at least once a year, no matter what.

At the main Staten Island location, open only during the summer, they sell something they call "Cream Ice". It's divine. It's not ice cream; it has the texture of Italian ice; but it is creamy, like ice cream and unlike Italian ice. I don't care what it is. It's good.

I should dedicate this post to a list of things I should do once a year, without fail. But I'm tired and my neck is killing me. (I pulled a muscle in it yesterday, while sitting here in front of my computer.) So the list will have to wait.

True Enuff

"We don’t discover (we can’t discover) whether the Elgin Marbles ought to be returned to Greece by embarking on archaeological digs in order to discover facts about human evolution." Richard Joyce, "The Evolution of Morality", p. 191

Maybe the world's just a really big idea!

Big ideas are nice. I just like to keep them distinct from the world itself.

Idealism

I tend to think there's a pretty important distinction between thoughts/representations and what our thoughts/representations are about. Some would disagree. Regardless, I was moved by the Flickr comparison of Joe's Best and In-N-Out, linked to in the post below, to provide my own comparison of a representation of an In-N-Out burger and the real thing.

On a side note: it sure would be nice to be in Southern California right now.

My Double (Double)

Truly, bizarro Charles exists!

NY Pizza

I'm going out for some pizza tomorrow night in Manhattan. Luckily, someone in NYC shares my documentary tendencies.

Eden Center Banh Mi

I've had access to a car for the past few days, so I've been systematically checking out the banh mi options at the Eden Center, in Falls Church. The center calls itself "Saigon East", which is charming in a "we're going to make something of this place" sort of way (it is, after all, only a strip mall). The strip mall it's in used to contain, among other things, a Carvel and KMART. They're both gone. Now it's all Vietnamese restaurants, markets, and stores. It now contains the legendary "Four Sisters" restaurant, which I haven't yet checked out, and has Vietnamese road signs on the rows (aisles?) in the parking lot. I don't know what else to say about it.

My Reviews:

Song Que
Nhu Lan
Banh Mi So

And my review of the best banh mi (I've had) in northern Virginia:

Banh Mi D.C. Sandwich

Song Que

I liked Song Que's banh mi sandwich the best of the bunch I tried at the Eden Center, but I still think Banh Mi DC Sandwich (down Route 50) is the best I've ever had. Song Que's banh mi is the spiciest I've had, which I liked, but overall I thought the ratio of bread to filling was too high and the filling itself wasn't crispy and juicy enough. Mostly, it was just spicy. The short and stubby roll was a change from Banh Mi DC Sandwich's ultra-long baguettes, but in the end I have to say working my way through it just reinforced my sense that a nice long banh mi roll beats out a thick fat one any day.

Nhu Lan

Although Nhu Lan is often described as hidden away and hard to find, I found it rather easily; it's in the small mall under the Eden Center tower. It is the smallest of the banh mi places I tried at the center. While their sandwich was perfectly fine, it wasn't anything special. I can only guess that the main appeal of this place (it got rave reviews on chowhound and in the Washington Post) is that for your average Washington Post reader it seems out of the way, in a kind of "people like us don't ordinarily eat here" sort of way.

Banh Mi So

This is was the most disappointing, least interesting of the banh mi sandwiches I tried at the Eden Center. I hate to say this, because I really liked the look and feel of the place. As I walked up, two young women who worked there were playing a kind of modified hacky sack in the front parking lot, kicking a small plastic thing that looked like an enlarged badminton shuttlecock back and forth. Seeing them do this solved a question that had been lurking in my subconscious for a month or so. I bought one of those shuttlecock things about a month ago in Little Saigon (L.A.) but couldn't figure out what it was for. The one end has a kind of plastic springy thing that I thought would make it bounce, but when I tried bouncing it I found out it isn't anywhere near springy enough for that to be the point of it, so I had no idea what it was for. Well, now I know.

The sandwich itself was pretty bland. It had one big very spicy pepper on it, but other than that it didn't have much flavor at all. The bread appeared to be freshly baked, but without an interesting filling that didn't do much good. (Speaking of which, a DVD extra on Rick Sebak's "Sandwiches That You Will Like" documentary is an absurdist collage of people debating whether the bread or filling is more important to making a good sandwich. What struck me about this collage is how we're able to watch, and understand, people's comments, even when they're edited together so quickly that all you're ever really hearing are sentence fragments. Are there any precedents for this sort of linguistic expression? I can't think of any.)

Snakes in the Theater

It was only a matter of time...

The Female Body

What are we doing to it? Where did it go?

(Didn't think I'd get all political on you, did I? I like to shake thing up a little now and then, just to keep you guessing.)

SoaP Update

SoaP Prep Kit

Tacconelli's Pizza

I was in Philadelphia yesterday for a co-ed baby shower, so I had to re-visit Tacconelli's Pizza. For the few who don't know, Tacconelli's makes one of the better pizzas in North America. Five things stand out about Tacconelli's:

(1) The crust. When they get it just right, it's light, flexible, and a little bit crisp, with a slightly burnt underside (for flavor).

(2) The sauce. Pretty simple, heavy on the tomato and garlic. Very distinctive.

(3) The oven. They have an enormous brick-lined wood-burning oven, one that's so large they have to use a pizza peel with a handle that's probably 10 feet long. Stupidly, I once again delayed taking a picture of the oven and peel until it was too late and they had already shut down the kitchen. It just goes to show you: if you think of taking a picture, take it! Don't wait until later.

(4) The ordering. You must call them 24 hrs. in advance to reserve your dough. Pizza dough is best if you make it and let it sit out overnight before cooking. For this reason, Tacconelli's only makes just enough. Any more, and it would sit around for too long. Any less, and it wouldn't sit around long enough.

(5) The wait. We waited for over an hour for our pizzas, which was perfect. This was probably the best thing about the meal. I hadn't seen the friend I went with in almost a year--which is far too long--and the wait gave us a chance to talk, with no room to wonder whether the other would like to go, etc.

I should say, for the record, going out for pizza with this old friend of mine is particularly fitting, as he once drove with me for over ten hours round trip to try out a pizza place that I read about at the dentist's office. (It was worth it. Not perfect, but quite good.)

Snakes on a Plane...

...is a really good time when you're in a theater full of people who brought plastic snakes with them, make hissing sounds at crucial moments in the movie, and cheer every time anything cool happens.

(Image above is from David R. Ellis's earlier masterpiece, "Cellular".)

Tie My Tubes and I'll Die of Loneliness

Living on a desert island is pretty lonely, but luckily I brought the internet along with me. Check out the following conversation I've been having at an old friend's blog. Our conversation begins in the August 14, 2006 post titled "Musings at an old bookstore" and continues in the August 16, 2006 post "When it doesn't stick out".

El Pollo Rico

One of the real bonuses of living in the DC area is the fact that there are a number of great Peruvian rotisserie chicken places around town. EPR is one of the best.

Since returning to DC, I've been scanning the regional Chowhound message boards for leads and I recently came across a post claiming that EPR is overrated. A quick glance at the content of this post, however, sufficed to dismiss it out-of-hand. The idiot who wrote it admitted that he prefers not to eat the skin of rotisserie chicken. If the appeal of EPR's chicken lay in something other than the tastiness of its skin, this *might* be a sensible thing to say before going on to judge their chicken to be overrated. But, of course, the whole point of EPR chicken is the flavor of its dry-rubbed chicken skin. Contrary to other online commentators, I don't think their chicken is especially juicy. (It doesn't compare with beer can chicken, for instance, nor the chicken I once had at a place where they poured beer directly onto the charcoal while cooking.) But that skin is delish.

If EPR made chicken crispers, they would be filthy rich.

Monkey Toes

Dare I say it? I'm a fiend for mojitos. The main problem with this habit, however, is that they're rather expensive. In an attempt to save money, I turned to the internet. The Food Network's and Bacardi's recipes were in agreement, so I got the relevant ingredients and we devoted much of Saturday night to trying to make a drinkable mojito from scratch. We failed.

The online recipe calls for fresh mint, fresh lime, sugar, club soda, and rum. It says to first muddle the mint, slices of lime, and sugar, and then add the club soda and rum. The result, however, as one witness put it, "tasted like mint club soda".

The next day, when I mentioned this failure in several phone conversations, it was suggested (more than once) that the online recipe was wrong to include club soda as an ingredient. It was also suggested that using limeade concentrate is an easy way to avoid having to create the sugar and lime mixture oneself. My initial reaction was to dismiss these suggestions. But, upon consideration, I decided that some field work was in order. One of my interlocutors, a more consistent DC resident than myself, suggested an Adams Morgan location that, he claimed, has the best mojitos in DC: the Rumba Cafe. So, last night, we went and observed.

To be honest, our observations were more participatory-anthropologist and less detached-sociologist. We did not, in any sense, try and understand our subject "from outside".

My interlocutors were triply right: the bartender at Rumba Cafe included limeade concentrate and excluded club soda. And his mojitos were really good. Here's how he did it.

Begin with a couple of stalks of mint and put them in what (I guess) is a 10 oz. glass. Add three fresh lime wedges, a tablespoon of sugar, and a splash of melted limeade concentrate. Muddle this mixture in the glass itself, with the goal of crushing the mint leaves without crushing the mint stalks. Add ice, and then rum, filling both to the top of the glass. Then shake the glass vigorously, in that way that bartenders do it, with another larger glass on top, and pour the resulting mixture into the original 10 oz. glass. Serve.

The size of the glass is important. When I tried following this recipe at home, the glass I used was too large and the ensuing mixture was a glass of mint rum. So I'm going to wait until I have a proper sized glass, as well as a proper muddler and shaking glass, before trying again.

Watts Towers

After many, many years of planning on visiting, this summer I finally made it to the Watts Towers. Of the single-obsessed-man folk art environments I've been to, it ranks pretty high. Below the Grotto of the Redemption in Iowa and Howard Finster's Garden of Eden in Georgia, but above everything else I can think of. It is truly impressive and the potential unity of the work, if critically defensible, might well make it the most interesting of the bunch. Our tour guide argued that the three main towers, placed in a row and inside of a larger oval shaped structure, signify the masts of a boat. If this is at all plausible--and if we could make some sense of why it would be a boat at all--then that would give the work an overall unity that no other such environments have. Maybe this sort of folk art isn't the sort of thing that has a unity, though; maybe it just isn't that sort of thing. Or maybe the only thing that unifies it is that it was all built by one dude, whose reasons remain pretty mysterious.

The most surprising thing about it, for me, was what surrounds it. There are some other houses along one side of it, but the three other sides are taken up by a big park, one that I don't think was originally there. The day we went, this sense of isolation was exaggerated by the sun: it was terribly bright out, without any shade at all, and this gave the whole place a very washed-out feel.

In the community center attached to it there was a seriously cool exhibit, put together by a local high school teacher. She was able to get a bunch of students to write about themselves, and she took accompanying photos of them and their lives. Apparently, she first did this over ten years ago, and then got the same people to re-describe their lives ten years later. Their handwritten comments were bound together into long books that folded-out, along with her photos. The autobiographical stuff they wrote was tremendously earnest, and moving. The whole exhibit was really impressive.

It made me think of the Oxford Project, although in some ways it was more moving. The photos weren't as good--they really didn't add anything to the autobiographical comments--but the comments themselves were more detailed, and seeing them written in the author's own hand was especially moving. As far as I could tell, it was put together entirely by a local teacher who eventually got some city funding; it would be cool it this sort of thing was done on a more widespread basis.

I've rented Wattstax from the local public library. I'm going to go watch it now, and finish drinking the rather mediocre homemade monkey toe I just made myself.

Food Factory

When I told my sister that I went to Food Factory, an Afghan place in Ballston, for lunch today and that at lunch they only have a buffet, she summed up my experience perfectly with a simple four word phrase: "Buffets are bad, Charles". Of course, she's right, but when I went I didn't know that they have a lunch buffet. Previously, I had only been to Food Factory for dinner, and it had always been a la carte--and good. But a buffet is a terrible thing, and it does terrible things to food, so today was the first and last time I'll go to Food Factory for lunch. The details are unremarkable, so I won't bother you with them.

DC Banh Mi Reigns Supreme!

In accord with my recent observation that first generation American restaurants are the place to go for affordable tastiness, I drove down Rt. 50 today and had lunch at DC Banh Mi, a local Vietnamese sandwich destination. Perhaps one of the few good things to come from France's colonial occupation of Vietnam, the Banh Mi sandwich is a spicy combination of meat and veggies on a baguette. The key to a good Banh Mi sandwich is to get maximum tastiness with a minimum amount of meat and veggies, and to serve this up on a freshly baked baguette. DC Bahn Mi does as good a job at achieving this goal as anywhere else I've been; even better, I'd say, than most--including the excellent Banh Mi sandwich I had last week in Little Saigon, near Anaheim, CA.

According to Washington area Chowhound discussion board, though, there's an even better Banh Mi place in Falls Church. I'll have to check it out next.

On the budget tip: my lunch, including bottled water, was $4 today. If I had bought five sandwiches, I would've gotten one free.

NoVa Redeemed

After yesterday's debacle, I wasn't willing to take any chances today. So I went straight to the best NoVa has to offer: El Charrito Caminante on Washington Blvd. (right across the street from where Whitey's used to be). They didn't disappoint. For $5 I got a chicken burrito supreme, which was excellent, and a mandarina Jarritos soda. Their burritos are not enormous, you can comfortably pick them up and eat them with your hands, and they have a simple combination of meat, beans, guacamole, etc. The tortillas they use are perfect: fresh, a little bit crisp, but flexible enough to stay together for the entire time it takes you to eat it. The burrito I had today was just a little bit spicy: not bland at all, but not too much of a challenge for my over-sensitive (to hot spices) taste buds. It probably had just the right amount of spiciness for me--as I currently am--but next time I'm going to challenge myself by asking them to make it spicier.

The tremendous difference between today's and yesterday's burritos makes me think that for tasty but economical meals, first generation American establishments may be the place to go. This may be an obvious thing to say, but sometime the obvious needs stating. The only exceptions I can think of in NoVa are Elevation Burger in Falls Church and Tony's Pizza in Manassas. Can anyone think of any others?

Baja Fresh

After a quick weekend stopover in Buffalo, I'm now officially back in the suburbs of Washington D.C. As befits my new station, I went to Baja Fresh for dinner. It was depressing, a fact that was exagerated by the following two mistakes of mine:

(1) I ordered the standard burrito, instead of the "Mexicano" version
(2) I ate inside

The standard burrito contains NO beans; instead, it consists mostly in bland veggies, rice, and chicken. Not spicy at all.

The interior of Baja Fresh was doubling depressing: the A/C was overwhelmingly cold and George Thorogood was overwhelmingly annoying as he and his kin blasted out of the inescapable sound system.

True to rumor, Baja Fresh does offer a fish taco, though I don't think I'll be going back anytime soon to try it. Maybe I will, but I certainly won't eat inside. And I might simply decline the chips; they, like the burrito, were practically tasteless.