Wendy's salad? Never. But Potacho!

To continue pounding away at the idiots in Los Angeles, who are putting a moratorium on new fast food construction in certain impoverished areas, I present the Potacho, the kind of food one can get at the type of sit-down restaurants that are likely to show up in the places they're worried about.

Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro

A much lauded restaurant in suburban Maryland (Cowen here, but he links to all reviews), the clientele of Bob's 66 Noodle Bistro bears witness to its status as the best (or at least most authentically good) Chinese food in the area. The menu's unusual, and packed with spices and offal. To celebrate, I ordered a cold pig's ear salad to start. It was crunchy, and gelatinous, and meaty all at the same time, the potentially overbearing pork wonderfully offset by a searing spice. While I was nibbling at that (and half is with me today for lunch), my thick noodle soup with squid and mushrooms arrived. I could have done without either the tough squid or the relatively flavorless mushroom, and with more of the tasty noodle and broth. In fact, I just turned it into a noodle soup with my spicy fried squid balls, which arrived shortly later and tasted wonderful dunked in the soup (I'm not sure how much I insulted people by doing this, but then, it's not that kind of place).

I'll be back. There's a duck tongue dish on the menu, and I saw an even thicker noodle in someone's plate that I'm going to have to locate. My only problem with restaurants like this is that one is always suspicious that everyone else has a menu you have to make an effort to extract. Even so, the public menu's pretty good.

Maggie Moo's

That's it. I apologize for everything bad I ever said about Pinkberry. Because yesterday, I got a cone at the worst ice cream store I've ever seen. I don't mean just the chain it was part of, though the ice cream itself was milky treacle and little more (is there any excuse these days for ice cream this bad?) I mean the particular store. Specifically, Maggie Moo's in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the Washingtonian Center, where the manager looked at the line forming due to his own horrible service, blew out his cheeks, and then ambled to the back for a good fifteen minutes, at which point he returned, told a customer they couldn't have a marshmallow "mix-in" effectively because he didn't like mixing in marshmallows, and then wandered off again, leaving in place two even more junior people who would see to the occasional customer in intervals between chatting to their visiting friends, who kept bragging loudly about the 10% discount they were getting. Why didn't I leave? At some point, it's worth staying, just for the scene.

Chicken Out Rotisserie

I felt like some roasted chicken yesterday (too long away from home, I guess), so I visited a successful DC area chain, Chicken Out Rotisserie. The one good thing to say is that the chickens are, as a matter of theory, promising - no antibiotics, no hormones, and so on. In reality, the chicken was a fairly tasteless mass, rendered grainy by a stint in some kind of steam closet, only halfway saved by an attempt at an enthusiastic spice rub tempered heavily by the fear that people don't like spices. Side dishes were similarly lame. However, I did enjoy my cashier's over-the-top enthusiasm. "I hope the gentleman enjoys his soda", he said. "I wish the gentleman a fantastic evening", he added. I did. As soon as I left his restaurant.

LA continued

PG helpfully points me to an LA Times article which discusses the LA fast-food ban. Here's the definition of fast food:

"any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers."

I can't help but point out the number of problems with this definition. To take a few: Burger King makes its burgers to order (something that supposedly exempts Subway, mentioned later in the article), as does Wendy's. I think the definition is supposed to exempt burrito shops, which are unquestionably just as unhealthy as any of city council's bug bears. Limited menu (as the article mentions) has no definition. It allows me to open any number of restaurants serving fat burgers piled high with bacon so long as I make them to order. It would theoretically ban a fast food low fat vegan restaurant that relies on tofu. Artichoke Pizzeria would be a no go. Etc, etc.

Honestly, wouldn't it be nice if the government could just restrict who it meant to restrict? If you're going to adopt such a paternalistic regulation, just say it applies to McDonald's, Wendy's, KFC, whoever. I'm not a fan of these definitions that try to appear generally applicable, but are actually just efforts to capture some company without naming them.

Sushi bowl

Can someone explain to me in what sense this "sushi bowl" (cited approvingly by the ever clueless Ezra Klein) has anything to do with sushi, either in the American or Japanese sense? Also, didn't the Japanese think of a version of this that has something to do with sushi a really long time ago? I mean, they gave it a name and everything.

Los Angeles

I see that Los Angeles has put a moratorium on new construction of fast food restaurants in certain neigborhoods of the city. I've been looking for the regulation, and have had no luck.

The reason I'm looking for it is that I can't understand (a) how they plan to differentiate fast food restaurants from any other kind of restaurant. (b) why they think having a bunch of fast food restaurant is less healthy than a bunch of sit-down restaurants and (c) what they want people who live in these places to eat.

On (a), I rather suspect that if you were to open a little burger chain in Los Angeles, the regulation wouldn't apply to you (though, prove me wrong). But why not? Mcdonald's offers much healthier options than, say, Five Napkin Burger. As for (b), substituting Bennigan's (well, perhaps not Bennigan's) in place of McDonald's doesn't strike me as having any particular health benefits, unless the benefit consists of culling everything affordable out of the neighborhood, leaving residents to mill pathetically around places they can't pay for before heading home to cook with ingredients they can't buy in their neighborhood for lack of grocery stores. This doesn't strike me as a policy likely to improve outcomes.

Les Delices

In my long-running quest to find cake of any quality in America, (rare, other than apparently in Aran's home), I stopped by Les Delices bakery on East Gude Street in Rockville, MD, last night. (full disclosure, it's owned by a family friend).

The fruit tart was clearly a sideshow. Although I prefer bakers to underplay sweetness, the pastry cream was unsettlingly neutral, and the pie crust both too thick and a little burnt. Nor was I totally impressed with what the almond croissants looked like - (why were they sliced in half? ).

But these are minor gripes, because the chocolate cake (what in France would be called something like a pave au chocolat, or effectively, an opera without the coffee layers) was very good. A crisp, flavorful biscuit at the bottom was a terrific setting for chocolate buttercream of real quality (the Washington DC area is positively rife with truly appalling "French" bakeries, and the most appalling part of most of them is the wretched, stinking, canned whipped cream, chemical gunk-tasting sludge they claim is cream). Most important, the cake avoided many of the pitfalls of the usual American attempt to do French pastry -it wasn't too big, or too sweet, or cloying, or too complicated, or too refrigerated, or stale. At $3.50, the small slice is expensive for around here. But it's the equal of anything I've had in New York, except for Payard's opera, which I judge to be a little more refined (as well as a full dollar more expensive).

Gifford's

Do you want to know what (food) injustice is? That places like Gifford's, a stunningly good ice cream chain in Maryland, are flat out empty on Monday night, at the same time that silly frauds like Pinkberry are printing money in New York.

The almonds on my $3(!) (on Monday only) Sundae were fresh, the chocolate obviously melted quality stuff rather than some sugary gloop, and the ice cream itself creamy and fresh tasting. I'll be back.

Tapei Tokyo

A confused mess of a restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, mixing Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean food. I flipped to the narrative story at the front of the menu to try to figure out which of the parade of food they might know something about, and it turned out that it started life out as a noodle bar. So, after nibbling through some fried tofu (I peeled off the batter, which I found extremely unnecessary) I ordered a thai style soup with shrimp. Not that I expected so much, but the shrimp were undistinguished (obviously just standard issue frozen shrimp), and there were none of the promised vegetables. I poured in soy to add some flavor. Near the bottom of the bowl, my mouth did start picking up some heat, but, to quote the 300, this is Thailand! No Thai soup should be so tame. On the other hand, the owner or manager was wandering around being solicitous, and the service was friendly. I have come to realize that the latter of those two things can turn a mediocre restaurant into someplace you might become a regular.

The underlying thought I had while sitting at Tapei Tokyo was more interesting than the food. Are we now at the point where every major world cuisine has been introduced to the market? Thirty years ago, say, one could reasonably say that there was this enormous country, called Japan, about which people knew nothing from a culinary perspective. Same with Thailand. Perhaps the same with India, although my impression is that Indian food penetrated major US markets first. But is there anything out there right now that can do what sushi did? My nomination is for Chinese food. Of course, we all think we know Chinese food. But it must be in a state of flux, and I cannot believe that a country whose wealth has undergone such an extreme revolution in the past couple of decades will not eventually produce something exportable that isn't moo shu chicken.


(Tyler Cowen's thoughts on a different branch, here)