Time is an illusion...

....lunchtime doubly so !*

Random musings for the day: At what point do the hypothetical cons (food quality, poor service (eg. rudeness/attitude), décor/cleanliness, price) overcome the pros of eating at a place (food quality, good service, convenience, price, statements of sorts)? In the specific context of a lunch, should some variables trump all (eg. convenience, price)?

Is a single instance of a “con”, reason enough to consider not patronizing a particular restaurant anymore? No background here in the interest of fairness – every restaurant may have a bad day. Oddly enough, I think I am readier to forgive mediocre food than (perceived?) impolite behavior on said bad day.

In other campus notes - Sadly, summer has taken its toll on both lunch carts worth visiting around the VCU main campus – Nate & Olio. MCV carts are still going strong.
The new ownership at Rev it Up has now had some time to get settled - some modifications and changes in menu but they've largely hewed to the previous version.
Construction on Grace will apparently only add to the plethora of chain eateries around campus. A bit on the IHOP - Aramark nexus. Not anti-chain per se but feel an opportunity lost to add some local flavor, quite literally.

6/21 x 7/2

"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?"
— *- Douglas Adams "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

menu clouds

A couple of layovers later, I have the chance to post my latest bit of data analysis fun (time-wasting?). For some time now, I have been thinking of checking out the degree of "commonality" among menus here in RVA and a method of visualizing the same.

This last restaurant week and word clouds provided a nice opportunity to look at this data. Assuming that the 30 restaurants that participated provide a fairly good cross-section and are fairly representative of menu/food preferences in RVA (a decent approximation in retrospect), it was easy to extract the menus from here and voilà.

So here are the word distributions among menus in the area. Data interpretation is left to the kind reader (methinks the preponderance of 'safe' options is telling).

Entrée:


Main Course:


Dessert: