I prefer to sit in the company of my own home with a good chinky and bottle of wine
You can't beat home cooked food and seldom can a restaurant make basic food, say a roast, taste like home cooked.
What is chinky?
I prefer to sit in the company of my own home with a good chinky and bottle of wine
I prefer to sit in the company of my own home with a good chinky and bottle of wine
Bob, forgive me for slightly redirecting the thread, but I think it is within topic...
I'm curious about other cities and their level of culinary competitiveness.
One of the things about New Orleans area that I believe is NOT common to all areas is the intense competitive nature of the restaurant trade - at least, I think it is less intense elsewhere. If you open a restaurant here, you had better serve pretty decent food or you will be out of business in a week from having NO clientele. Word of mouth here is awesome as a way to weed out the trash restaurants. We have a couple of local tabloid newspapers and lots of local web sites that very quickly spread the word about new restaurants. The critics are anonymous by permission of the tabloid management. So we have the "Mr. Food" or the "Underground Gourmet" or similar names on the by-lines. The only way that mediocre restaurants survive here is to specialize in a rare cuisine, but even then, if you are bad, you are bad - and word gets around quickly.
I think part of our uniqueness in the New Orleans food industry is because we have so many choices that any of us could very easily eat at a different restaurant of reasonable quality every night of the year if we wanted to, and still miss over half of the good restauarants in the city.
If you give people a good flavor for their hard-earned dollar, they will come back for more. If you give people dreck, they will never visit you again - and they will tell their friends. I've seen restaurants open and close again within a month, not because they were terribly underfunded, but because their culinary staff had no particular talent.
From places I have visited around the USA, I have noted that the number of restaurants per capita is lower elsewhere than cities like New Orleans, San Francisco, or New York. Have any of you noticed this condition or am I way off in my observation?
Another slight redirect.... Doc have you seen any change in seafood prices/availability because of the oil spill thats going on there?
I would think more food is now cooked in oil down there.
Col
I do not know if these qualify as restaurants.
Superior Dairy in Hanford, CA. Best store bought ice cream. Very large portions. Single scoop can feed two people.
Don't remember the name, but there was once a bakery that the Menonites ran in Butler, MO that makes donuts with potato flour.
Excellent root beer at the Louisburg cider mill in (actually near) Louisburg, KS. Called Lost Trail Root beer. You can go online and get the order form.
I love Birch Beer, but it's not very common here in Florida.