The trip to Zanzibar, although long, was reasonable enough, and aside from four hours spent (as probably the only haram dhimmi kafir infidel types in a surreal windowless Nairobi airport basement sleeping lounge — $42 for four hours — thoroughly uneventful. The only real excitement came when we learned Kenya Airways had lost Karin’s suitcase.
Restaurants
Aug 172010
Part of the problem with having a nice wine fridge and a girlfriend who likes filling it is that someone has to actually figure out how the damn bottles fit into it. And that is the abominable, reprehensible, enviable problem with our dear Smeg cabinet — advertised by the despicable lying British shits who seem [...]
It’s a good thing to get away from the chaos of 14 Juillet in Paris, when you’re not too inclined to go stand in line at 6 a.m. to see Sarkozy review his military toys (even though I really want to see that some day…but then again, 6 a.m…) It’s an especially good thing if [...]
This is the out-of-the-way-of-all-the-tourists place to go to on a warm summer weekend afternoon for large helpings of gut-burstingly good steak tartare or cheeseburgers (assuming you remember to tell them to leave off the damn ubiquitous cocktail sauce. Why does everyone in Europe put that crap on perfectly good burgers?)
There’s something mildly dispiriting about eating in the “cheap” version of a high-end place. It’s probably a natural instinct to always want whatever’s perceived as better, which is what leads people to stupidities like blowing $1k on an iPhone app that says “I’m rich”, or spending 2,000 pounds on a pizza. Note to pizza diners: [...]
“Power lunch” was how Karin described this place, and that’s not far off. You can almost imagine Patrick Bateman trying to get a reservation for lunch. The charming Italian manager pushes it off that track quickly, though, but it’s still a cool-looking restaurant.
According to mom, this is the first of the cool neighborhood eateries that you see all over the place, these nifty small restaurants that all my friends in San Francisco seem to know about. Fair enough, but who cares. I’d be innately suspicious of anything that seems to elicit unanimously positive reactions from all my [...]
Supposedly it’s the shiznits in San Francisco right now, the nonplusultra of awesome places to go eat at. Never mind that, during two weeks in SF we ate our way through about a quarter of the top 100 restaurants in the City, according to one local newspaper. Works for me. So, when mom not-too-subtly hinted [...]
Dec 312009
The honking gets to you after a while, especially after a long day banging around Hanoi, which manages to leave you gritty and dirty from the humidity and dust and miscellaneous unidentifiable culinary delights smoking from improvised sidewalk coal stoves, despite the still-overcast skies and comparatively cool temperatures (“oh, it’s usually never like this.” Gee, [...]
The honking gets to you after a while, especially after a long day banging around Hanoi, which manages to leave you gritty and dirty from the humidity and dust and miscellaneous unidentifiable culinary delights smoking from improvised sidewalk coal stoves, despite the still-overcast skies and comparatively cool temperatures (“oh, it’s usually never like this.” Gee, [...]