Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Additional con of the first school of thought - many browsers, anti-virus, etc block the launch of additional windows.

I wouldn't go back. Its that simple. Life is to short to worry about one restaurant. Give it a year and another restaurant will be in its place.

(As for "dd" and "dh" - quite honestly these two abbreviations aren't that common and should be avoided in a front page question)

I always loathed Emeril and I never did get into Mario's programs. The only two shows on the Food Network that I can watch without wanting to throw something at the TV are Good Eats and Iron Chef. And its Alton Brown that make those shows work. Anyone want to take bets on how long Alton lasts?

I've been paging through the book. I really enjoy Ruhlman's writing style. The definitions are written clearly.

However I really wished they used different paper and ink for the book - its difficult to read in dim lighting conditions.

The loud piercing sound of a black labrador retriever yiping in pain because I stepped on its paw as it sneaked up behind me to grab something that fell on the floor.

Last time I was in New York my partner and I stumbled on Les Halles in Midtown and enjoyed dinner there so much we returned the next day for lunch. Of all my trips to Manhattan its the only restaurant that I been too twice. I only remembered when I got home that this was the last restaurant that Bordian was exec chef at.

Well Andrew Zimmern lives in town. Alton just popped through with his road show just a short time ago so he was already taken care of (rumor has it he picked up a new tattoe while here). Bourdain? Next month he will be talking about his book and eating at the place I would of taken him - Solera - excellent tapas. Otherwise a german restaurant named Black Forest.

I loath olives. But I do end of cooking with olive oil on a frequent basis. But I stick to virgin because the taste of the olives doesn't come through as strongly.

The Minnesota State Fair (starts this weekend) is renown for deep frying -anything- that isn't nailed down. You go to the state fair to eat fried foods - its as part of the experience as hitting machinery hill or watching the animal competitions. But is it really the oil that makes up the balk of what is bad about deep fry twinkies? If you remove the trans-fat from the oil aren't you still injecting loads of bad stuff into your system? I am not getting the point here.

(looking forward to deep fried cheese curbs and turkey legs with loads of trans-fat)

My grandmother would make meatloaf and it was incredible. My mother would make the "same thing" and it was awful.

Order a couple pizza's.

(sorry to be snarky but I have little patience for vegetarians.)

Hand written notes scanned into the computer and indexed with tags. If I have an existing recipe with hand written notes - I print it out - make additional notes and rescan it in.

My beef (no pun intended) with recipe software is that they are inflexible or the challenge of being able to access a recipe from any one of my 5 computers (windows, mac, linux). I have also been underwhelmed by the ability to export or import recipes in a non-proprietary format. For example I want to be able to export a recipe to a website but I have not found an decent way of doing this yet. Chances are I'll end up writing something on my own.

Personally I don't mind loud environments. But if the environment is so loud that you can't hear someone a foot away than its a problem. I can't find it plausible that a restaurant can survive if your group can't talk to each other. Its as simple as that. I would be interested to note how Mercat or Resto adjust their environment or even survive.

Some of those same people claim that their restaurants are meant for people who welcome sitting in that kind of environment, those carefree young folks who actively seek out those kinds of eating experiences.

Then they misunderstand their customers - whether they be 21 or 51. If you can't talk to each other than those people -aren't coming back-. 21 year olds are a heck of lot more social than 51 year olds. Perhaps they expect them to instant message each other the entire meal?