David Trinh

I just got back from a quick two day vacation to Montreal.  A few thoughts:

1. The food was good.  The service was excellent.  Surprisingly enough I was more impressed by the service in Montreal than the food.  Don’t get me wrong, the restaurants were all quite good (Au Pied de Cochon, in particular was a real treat) but there are certainly places in Minneapolis that more than surpass what Montreal has to offer.  While the food wasn’t mind-blowing though, the level of service was incredible.  No snootiness, no French attitude (something I was prepared for after hosting two French cousins this past summer), and no sass.  I was impressed.
2. Businesses in Montreal have a strange aversion to accepting credit cards—only about one in three shops that I visited accepted plastic.
3. The subway in Montreal is one of the better mass transit systems that I’ve seen.  By American standards it was incredibly clean and I never waited more than five minutes for a train.  Evidentially nationalized transportation works in Canada.
4. Hotwire saved the day again by furnishing an incredibly nice room for a stunningly low price.  I highly recommend it.  Use betterbidding.com if you want a better idea of which hotel you’ll be landing before you commit.
5. Tim Horton’s is nothing special.

The Atlantic’s Food Wire has a series of posts up which explore arguments for and against the practice of tipping in American restaurants.  I actually happen to have pretty strong feelings about this, as I think that tipping is a really screwed up practice that smacks of classism and detracts from the experience of dining out.  I’m all about incentives for better service and for empowering consumers but nearly every waiter or waitress that I’ve ever talked to has told me that their tips are hardly correlated with the level of service.  It wouldn’t surprise me if in all but a few extreme cases most people tip a fixed percentage regardless of the quality of the service or the food.  In fact, from what I’ve read, the only thing that actually is correlated with tip amounts is the attractiveness of the waitstaff.  I can’t find the specific study that details this relationship but suffice to say, I think it makes a bit of intuitive sense that a prettier face generally earns a bigger gratuity at the end of the day.

Not only does tipping act as a poor incentive for good service but it also affords unscrupulous people an opportunity to free load by refusing to tip at all.  I’d much prefer a service regime that charged a fixed fee or percentage for service which would solve this free riding dilemma.  If the service is really bad and I feel that it needs to be ‘punished,’ I’d much rather go on Yelp and write a negative review than leave a miserly tip.

Conor Friedersdorf over at The American Scene and, in an expanded post, at The Daily Dish extols the promise of Yelp(!).  As a dedicated Yelper—newly promoted to elite status as of last week—this warms the cockles of my heart: I love Yelp and if you’re a reasonably savvy foodie, there’s no better place to turn for restaurant recommendations.  However, that ‘if’ in the previous sentence is a reasonably important factor in the appeal of Yelp.

Remember, not everyone is foodie and Yelp, by and large, is a review site written by like-minded people who look for similar qualities in the places they frequent.  If someone is not a foodie, and they follow the recommendations on Yelp, I’m not entirely convinced they’re going to end up liking the choice they were steered towards.  Personal anecdote: This summer I lived with a group of Yalies and occasionally we would use Yelp to sort out which place we would go to dinner.  Without fail there was always a group of holdouts who complained about the places that Yelp recommended; at the same time, I usually loved the restaurants Yelp served up.  What was going on?  Yelp’s skewed pool of critics was sending us to restaurants that appealed to my sensibilities, but didn’t exactly resonate with the culinary preferences of my dinner companions.

At the end of the day, I subscribe to the Ezra Klein school of thought when it comes to chain restaurants. This line of reasoning argues that people don’t go to places like The Cheesecake Factory because they’re tricked into thinking they like these restaurants; they go there because they actually enjoy them.  While I would not be so smitten with the prospect of dinner at Red Lobster, there are people who legitimately like eating there—this is fine.

The takeaway (no pun intended) from all this is that “good food” means something different to different people.  Unfortunately, I think dining critics (from Yelpers to Sam Sifton at the New York Times) assume that there is some sort of objective truth about the restaurant world that enables them to write reviews that will please all people.   This can’t be done.  There is a huge spectrum of subjective opinions on food that prevents a definitive account of a restaurant from being written.

I don’t believe that Yelp can influence people’s preferences for large-portions of high-fat, high-salt food. And, if Yelp can’t change the preferences of people who like eating at chain-restaurants, these same people are unlikely to get much value out of reading restaurant reviews written by people like me.  This is why I’m skeptical of Yelp’s ability to transform the dining habits of a large swath of Americans.

CityPages has good things to say about the St. Germain Sparkler at Meritage in St. Paul.  They’re right—the sparkler is delicious!  Unfortunately, like many cocktails at fancyschmancy restaurants it is also terrifically over-priced: this sparkler does not have anywhere close to $10.50 worth of booze in it.

Fortunately though, I can recommend that something which is a definite bargain at Meritage—the ‘recession Sunday’ dinner.  Priced at a mere $24, this steal of a meal is one of the best ways to spend your dining dollars in the Twin Cities.  Granted this prix-fixe can be sort of hit or miss, but sometimes it can be quite good—last week’s moules frites were sublime—and, for the price, this three course dinner can’t be touched.  Add in half-priced wine (some bottles run as little as $12), and you have the makings for one hell of a cheap (but still reasonably classy) date night.

Go.

The always excellent Ben Adler has a new article in the American Prospect describing the relationship between meat consumption and the environment.  I had always been aware that livestock was responsible for some environmental damage but I never appreciated the scale of the problem a steak poses to global climate change:

…meat consumption plays a bigger role in greenhouse gas emissions than even many environmentalists realize. The production and transportation of meat and dairy, particularly if you include the grains that are fed to livestock, is much more energy-intensive than it is for plants. Animals, especially cattle, also release gases like methane and nitrous oxide that, pound for pound, are up to 30 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Internationally there is an additional cost to animal agriculture: massive deforestation to make land available for grazing, which releases greenhouse gases as the trees are burned and removes valuable foliage that absorbs carbon dioxide. As a result, according to a 2006 United Nations report, internationally the livestock sector accounts for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — more than the transportation sector. (Bold mine- DT)

Wow.  Incidentally, I was actually a vegetarian for the first few months at Yale (given the limited vegetarian options at the U of M, vegetarianism wasn’t really an option there) but gave it up after a trip to Iceland where I was tempted by loads of delicious meat.  Now, however, I’m starting to reconsider whether or not I should make my vegetarian vows once again.

On a whole though, I’m rather uncomfortable with individual action that’s aimed at solving large social problems.  For example, I scoff at environmentalists who buy Priuses in an effort to ‘save the earth’ because really, one person’s decision to change their behavior matters so little at the macro level.  I know, I know, you can make the argument that it’s better to do something than nothing, that one person can make a difference, that everyone is a unique and precious snowflake, etc; however, as a general rule I’m not terribly willing to give up something I enjoy if others don’t have to as well.

What I am willing to do though is take these issues into consideration at the ballot box.  I’m very supportive of policies that make everyone give something up, even it constrains an activity I enjoy.  This is why I think I would be willing to embrace a tax on meat—a sort of sin tax on carnivores if you will.  After all, if we’re willing to consider taxing soda, why not meat too?  Both, if consumed in excess, have damaging health effects and both impose negative externalities on the rest of society.  Seems as if both meat and sugar would make prime targets for our cash-strapped treasury.

I’m currently en route to Vancouver BC on one of my famously long road trips.  Last December I did a long haul and drove from Minnesota to Seattle in a rather harrowing drive (which included 26.5 hours of continuous driving, three snowstorms and one avalanche); this time I’m taking things a little slower so I have time to take in the West—it’s awfully hard to appreciate the scenery in the absence of sunlight and sleep.

I love long road trips.  If done with others, they’re an amazing opportunity to make new friends or deepen existing relationships; if done by yourself, they offer an unparalleled chance for contemplation and self-reflection.   I am by myself on this trip and, in addition to all the thinking I’ve been doing, I’m also listening to backdated This American Life episodes.  Really backdated.  As in these episodes are from 1995, they’re live and the show is called “Radio Playhouse” instead of “This American Life.”  Good stuff.

Vancouver will give me a chance to cross the Canadian border for the first time (a shame that it has taken me this long I know) and an opportunity to let my inner-foodie run wild.  After that I’ll be heading to Portland for a night where I’ll hopefully have a chance to visit the Carlyle which is where one of my favorite bloggers, Jacob Grier, bartends.  Following that I will (likely) be spending a few days in Seattle before making a one day dash back to Minnesota.

All this is to say that posting here will be light over the next week.  I do have some prewritten content ready to go though, and I’m planning on having some downtime when I may manage to write a few pieces—so keep stopping by!  Enjoy the beginning of your lazy August days.

–DT

I think this sums up how I feel about most proponents of local food*.

Over at the Timothy Dwight Blog, one of my fellow sophomores Devin Smith (TD ’12) offers up some wisdom about dining at Yale.  For the most part, I think he is dead on: the food at Yale is pretty decent (although I’ve never seen venison on the menu), New Haven’s restaurants are stellar, and ‘Sustainable Food Thursdays’ leave much to be desired.

That said, I think Devin talks up the food in TD’s dining hall a bit too much.  Not to rag on my own college but TD’s Harry Potteresque tables aside, the TD dining hall is pretty subpar.  True, the staff is fine, ostensibly it serves the same food as every other dining hall on campus and it’s never crowded.  However, because of the low volume of students that eat at far-flung TD, the food is almost always cold and there do seem to be fewer options at Timothy Dwight than at other colleges, especially Berkeley and Branford.

In my opinion, by far the best place to go that’s affiliated with YDS is the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS).  The hallway leading up to the dining hall in HGS actually makes you feel like you’re in a castle (Harry Potter points!), and Yale must like its grad students a bit more because the food is ALWAYS better than whatever is served in the residential colleges.  Seriously.  I’ve had pizza that could rival Pepe’s here, as well as pad thai that flies just under Bangkok Garden’s.  Another good option that used to be available to Yalies was the law school but sadly the university has decided to cut us off from the over-priced sushi and sandwiches that could be purchased here.  For shame Yale.

The City of Minneapolis is evidentially thinking of putting restrictions on the number of 18-plus—as opposed to 21-plus—nights that downtown clubs can offer:

In downtown Minneapolis, where 18-and-older club events are a large slice of the nightlife pie, bar owners are buzzing over rumors that the city wants to curtail these lucrative nights…

Cervantes [a Minneapolis' licensing director] said, “Something needs to be done. This is really a safety issue in the sense that we have underage people who are consuming alcohol — and that combination often times leads to criminal behavior.

As someone who lived in the warehouse district (next to the Gay 90s) for a year, I can attest that downtown clubbers are obnoxious.  Every weekend they descended onto my neighborhood like a plague of scantily-clad, intoxicated locust, and generally made asses of themselves as they tried to mate with one another in the street, my alley, and the lobby of my apartment building.  And, I agree, the younger members of this unfortunate swarm were generally the worst.

However, while it may make sense to put more stringent age restrictions in place, let’s not pretend that the problem here is exclusively the fault of the 18-21 crowd that decides to spend a night on the town.  In my opinion, the underlying issue is the fact that America’s overly stringent age restrictions on drinking create perverse incentives for people who can’t legally drink to get as drunk as they possibly can before they hit the clubs on a Friday or Saturday night.  After all, if one can’t legally drink at a club, one needs to guzzle a lot of alcohol before one goes out in order to keep a decent buzz going—hence the horde of extremely inebriated 18-21 year olds who consume far too much at the beginning of the night and cause mayhem as the evening progresses.

Sure.  Minneapolis should an ordinance cracking down on 18-plus clubs, but it’s also time to revisit an expansion of the drinking franchise as well.

Ezra Klein goes after those arrogant foodies:

Foodies have an unfortunate tendency to alight on a Unified Field Theory of Corporate Food: It’s bad for the environment and bad for workers and bad for animals and bad for waistlines and, above all that, a fraud, because it also tastes bad. This would be convenient, if true. Foodies could be like Morpheus walking around in a chef’s toque offering people freedom through an organic fig. This has the virtue of being wrong and condescending at the very same time. If people weren’t actually enjoying what they were eating, then getting them to change it would be pretty easy. People aren’t somehow incorrect when they judge their meal a sensually pleasing experience. They, after all, are the ones who ate it.

I agree!  That being said though, I think most foodies (myself included) would argue that there’s more to a good meal than fat, sugar and salt.  For instance, I think good service makes or breaks a restaurant, and I definitely take into consideration the quality of an establishment’s bar when I’m deciding whether or not to return.  Although, I do suspect Klein could cede all this while still contending that when it comes to the taste of the food all that really matters is the before mentioned holy-trinity of deliciousness.

That may be true—I suspect delicacies, such as deep-fried macaroni and cheese (PDF), probably do taste pretty good.  The problem with dishes like this though, is they really only have one thing going for them: an insane amount of calories.  Once you get past all the sugar, fat and salt I doubt there’s going to be much substance left in the dish.  On the other hand, if you go to a fancyschmancy restaurant where all the dishes are made from scratch and the clientele largely well-educated, pretentious liberals, you’re more likely to find food that has depth.  Sure, sure, these things are subjective and I can’t say with certainty that a place like the 112 Eatery is better than The Cheesecake Factory but I still have to believe (in fact, I can taste!) that there’s some substance behind the critique of corporate food by the much-maligned foodie.