According to the Find Your Spot quiz, Round Top, Texas was the number one place in the US that I absolutely should not move to. Of course I had to check it out, and while it’s not that bad in person (hell, you could probably rent a house here for a hundred bucks), I still can’t help but think that a City Confidential episode or tornado target is in its future.
Note to road trippers in this part of Texas: most diners and restaurants are closed in the afternoon or evenings – assuming that they aren’t closed completely for December-January. I lucked out at the Chappell Hill Sausage Company which closed just as I was arriving at 4pm, but the reward was some astonishingly outstanding BBQ sausages (and homemade oatmeal walnut cookies).
Last April I had a chance to eat at the Burgerville in Vancouver, WA. I’d been wanting to go, Burgerville was described as being to the Pacific Northwest what Inn-N-Out Burger is to Southern California and I wasn’t disappointed at all. A damn fine hamburger that could stand proudly to the cherry pie at the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks.
A great burger chain needs a cranky, iconoclastic founder and Burgerville founder George Propstra (who just died last week) was no exception.
Propstra retired from the company more than a decade ago, but he never really left. He was regarded as Burgerville’s best customer and toughest critic. The day before he died, he was working out details for a bakery he planned to open next year in downtown Vancouver, The Oregonian reported.
Propstra opened the first Burgerville USA restaurant in Vancouver. He steadily expanded the operation into a 39-restaurant chain with 1,600 employees.
The belief in supporting his neighbors turned out to be good business, eventually causing Burgerville to be best known for its seasonal fruit milkshakes, Walla Walla sweet onion rings and Tillamook cheeseburgers.
Propstra became known to local television viewers in the 1980s, when he appeared in a pair of commercials. In one of them, he disdainfully smacked and flung a competitor’s frozen burger patty.
France traditionally celebrates the new year by eating pancakes which may just be the best cultural tradition ever. The only thing I could add is “why stop at new years?”
Red Bull drinkers might believe that they’re king of the extreme when it comes to hyper-caffination, and according to the alt.drugs.caffeine FAQ Red Bull does indeed have a lot of it, but it’s a puny #2 behind German soft-drink Afri-Cola who’s apparently been the world leader in saturating caffination for years.
Afri-Cola’s advertising gallery is a remarkable collection of cute animation, inexplicable euro-artiness, and vaguely racy ’70s soft-core. I don’t drink any kind of soft-drink, but the whole Afri-Kola design sense is oddly compelling. Maybe it’s because their logo reminds me of Savage Republic’s logo – both of which are based on the Wehrmacht’s Afrika Korps logo.
Note to self: when in Greenland, send out for Chinese food.
When you are in Greenland, don’t miss its loveliest town – Sisimiut. And when in Sisimiut, don’t miss Greenland’s special restaurant – Misigisaq! You will find Misigisaq Restaurant down in the atmospheric and historic port area (JM Jensenip Aqquserna), just where you disembark from your ship or where you enter town from the airport.
Misigisaq serves Greenlandic ingredients cooked in an authentic Chinese style – some of the best produce in the world cooked in the style of one of the world’s great cuisines.
By using a big variety of Greenlandic ingredients, Misigisaq’s cooks have added a new dimension to Chinese cuisine: Hot pots cooked on the table, popular in Beijing, in Sisimiut use Greenlandic lamb from Neqi (the national lamb supplier), which we cut into paper thin slices for fast cooking, with an option of adding caribou and musk ox meat. The Davis Strait Hotpot is a fondue packed with local seafood. The traditional rejuvenating Chinese herb, Heavenly Grass (a distant relative of the other type of hemp), is added to caribou in a clay pot. The Chinese vegetable suancai is cooked with cod to give a spicy flavour, as in Sichuan cooking. Fragrant and Spicy Snow Crabs is a dish based on cuisine in central China.
I can’t add anything more to what everyone else is saying (her Snopes page is hilarious), but one of my earliest recollections of her was a science film she did where she talked about how life on earth formed from the early amino acid chemicals and made “primordial soup” in her kitchen.
DATE: 6/2/04 SLUG: JAVA DESK: METRO A sign posted on the shuttered Brooklyn storefront of Josie’s Java coffe shop at 462 Court Street, between 3rd and 4th Place in Carroll Gardens, informs customers of the death of the store’s owner and long-time neighborhood persona Josephine “Josie” D’Esposito, who died Monday of heart failure at the age of 76. photo by Angela Jimenez for The New York Times photographer contact 917-586-0916
Jody (via kottke.org) links to Calvin Trillin’s article on Shopsin’s (and its cantankerous owner Kenny) in the Village and I realized that I completely forgot to link to a NY Times remembrance of Josie’s Java in Carroll Gardens.
Between the shoeshine man and Caputo’s, there is a dank, grim coffee shop where the customer is often wrong. The place is called Josie’s Java. It resembles a truck stop, and breakfast and lunch are served every day. Get dinner someplace else. In the evening, the door is covered by a grate painted to depict a full cup of coffee with an arm reaching up from inside the liquid, drowning or waving.
You do not pour cream into your coffee at Josie’s; you say when. She pours. She opened the place as a video shop two decades ago; that explains the free movies that sometimes come with coffee to reward good behavior. Once, in recognition of a 20-cent tip, she bestowed a copy of the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense.”
Josie’s may not have been the last angry diner, but there was only one Josephine D’Esposito. Wish I coulda met her.
One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which wouldn’t have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said “Die Yuppie Scum.” Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, “No, we’re closed.” After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discourage other latecomers.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” I said to Kenny.
“They were nothing but strangers,” he said.
“I think those are usually called customers,” I said. “They come here, you give them food, they give you money. It’s known as the restaurant business.”
Kenny shrugged. “Fuck ’em,” he said.
An attitude I greatly respect. Right now, I’m ready to just drive directly to Shopsin’s the minute I’m finally in NYC for good.
Bill Drummond has been involved in a number of what he himself calls “reckless schemes”. In 1992, at the height of his pop fame with the KLF, he and his partner, Jimi Cauty, exited the music business by “machine-gunning” the audience at the Brit awards with blanks, causing the composer Georg Solti to flee in terror. Two years later, as avant-pranksters the K Foundation, the duo burned £1m on the Hebridean isle of Jura. Drummond’s latest wheeze, however, is arguably his most surreal. He is visiting complete strangers and making soup for them.
It started like this: in May 1998, Drummond, whose culinary training consists of watching his mum in the kitchen, made soup for a “rabble of people” in a house in Botanic Avenue, Belfast. In January 2003, he made soup for some folk in Ewart Road, Nottingham. Then, in June last year, he took a map of the British Isles and drew a line across it, so it cut through Belfast and Nottingham and ended up at Ipswich. Drummond’s promotional flyers explain: “He made it known that anybody living on this Soup Line was welcome to invite him to their home to make soup for their family and friends. If asked why, Bill Drummond is likely to answer, ‘Because it is a friendly thing to do.'”
Johnnie’s may not have the best pastrami in town (Langer’s is the clear TKO winner here), but if you need a corned beef sandwich in the middle of the night there is nothing better.
Saturday night was onion soup night. I used Rachael Ray’s recipe as a starting point also, but switched a lot of things around also. I skipped the sherry and used beaujolais as my reduction sauce along with my usual allotment of leeks and shallots in addition to the onions. The end result didn’t have much complexity, but what tastes were there were wonderfully strong. Nice full-on rustic soup:
I made a second bowl with a less oily comte cheese in places of the “grocery store grade” gruyere, and it was fantastic. Nothing approaching The Best French Onion Soup On This Continent, but a good start.
