111!!11!

Easter cookies !!

Kimchi fried rice

At a recent brunch at The Roosevelt (one of my favorites in town), I saw a little dish that stuck out amidst the other terrific options - Ham and Mushroom Fried Rice with Kimchi.
I rarely do this, but it got me thinking to try this quick and easy variant (plus some other minor "fusion" modifications) to good old Kimchi fried rice.

(since this is largely emperical, no proportions listed but easy to figure out):
Cooked Rice (recipes recommend a day old rice but you can also cook rice just prior with a little less water)
Onion finely chopped
Fresh ginger and garlic
Julienned carrots
Mixed mushrooms
cubed ham (optional)
Kimchi, chopped up
Chili paste - Gochujang is best, Sambal oelek is a good substitute
Scallions, cilantro + dried seaweed (garnish)
(most available at many places in RVA including Tan A or any of the Korean stores on Midlothian Tpk)

Heat oil + bit of butter + saute ingredients. Add kimchi. Saute a bit longer. ++chilli paste to taste. Add the rice. Toss till well coated.
Fry an egg / serving. Garnish. Sauteed bok choy is a good side.

EAT !!

Pork bellies....

A nanosecond late to the pork belly party, but RVA has certainly embraced the international pork-belly-is-the-new-foie-gras mantra. Its hard to find a restaurant around town these days, that hasnt jumped on the PB bandwagon (not that I'm complaining).
Reminds me of Trading Places and commodity futures in pork bellies at the mercantile exchange. "Pork Bellies Going Down"



Violating one of my rules about not taking pictures of food in restaurants (the food trellis on this was was intriguing enough), a particularly interesting, crispy and spicy pork belly dish from the Peter Chang restaurant in C-Ville. Well worth a visit till the new location in Short Pump gets settled.

More OPEN

Nice to see that RVA is finally catching up on the incorporation of online reservations for dining (OpenTable). Participation up to around 50 since April (with several notable adoptions). Given that this is not an inexpensive proposition for the business, I do hope its working out (viz. economics + usage from patrons, the so called "incremental customer" who would not have visited otherwise). Some possible downsides. As a consumer, obviously its easy for me to want the convenience but I understand it isnt so straightforward.

One amusing mathematical conundrum is how many restaurants calculate themselves to be in the $$ range (is it possible with entrees hovering around $25 on average at most??). The Price reflects the estimated price of dinner for one with one drink and tip ($$ = $30 and under, $$$ = $31 to $50, $$$$ = $50 and over)

ampersats

New beginnings @ a familiar venue. The new S@AMPLE @ the site of the old Sprout and earlier incarnations. A nice, open (amazing how a wall or two changes up the place) modern decor with a "tech" slant (it was easier to connect to the open crossroads wireless next door!). Now open for lunch. Interesting small ($5-$12) and larger ($12-$15) plates. More appealing dining options around campus needed, so, despite questions as to value propositions (cf. above)... Good luck ahead !!

Some fun nicknames for the "at the rate of" or "at" (@ STP? or @locus) for scientists; ampersat @ - "strudel" in Hebrew, "snail" in Italian and Korean, "little mouse" in Chinese, "elephant trunk" in Swedish, "monkey" in German, "dog" in Russian and "little duck" in Greek!

Acacia (pollen)

Playing around with Lookup Tables recently, I came across a lovely electron microscope image of the pollen from the Acacia plant (Acacia saligna). Behold this beautiful (pseudocolored) "cookie shaped" disk of the acacia pollen around 50 micrometers in diameter! (as a point of reference, 50 micrometers is about half the diameter of a single strand of hair !!). The micro and nanoscales never cease to delight !!

While the pollen is blamed for bouts of sneezes, the restaurant of the same name in town continues to shine in the Richmond dining firmament.
A recent visit had us well pleased with the generally creative combinations of taste on the menu rounded off nicely with some delectable desserts from the pastry chef (almond parsnip cake?!).
Minor quibble follows: While the kitchen continues to impress, the floor seems to have some catching up to do (apparently a long recurring issue). Now, I am all for cold and impersonal (as opposed to fakely effusive) service as long as it is efficient; and Acacia is still one of the few establishments around that gets the little things done (water refills, folding napkins when a patron leaves the table - yes!). However, an eyebrow does get raised when a restaurant that deservedly aspires to this, ends up with waitstaff who dont know about the food they're serving ! An anomaly (?) but it would be helpful for instance, if one knew a wee more about certain items on the menu, what the cheeses on the plate were or able to respond to recommendation questions with a more educated answer than "everything is great". Perhaps the culinary equivalent of what in mathematics we call a "trivial solution", (synonymous with intuitively obvious)

Regardless, a fine restaurant I'm happy to still have on my favs list and well worth a visit (as an aside, vegetarians still have no luck, but the prix fixe menu @24 is easily one of the best "deals" in RVA for a solid weekday "fine" dining experience).

Back to the pollen image, I wonder if restaurants could have a "signature dish" in a literal sense (some clever word play perhaps or a crazy scientific allusion). Now that would be fun.

Progress goes boink

Its nice to see our engineers are working on complex and pressing problems of the day. From the same folks who brought you the Ferrari F430 - This device capable of optimizing the precise, multiplexed, on-demand delivery of carbonated, sub-room temperature, sugary fluids from a single flow nozzle is the kind of technology needed to offer consumers real choice.
(at the VCU Five Guys among other locations)

pecuniam et vini. et in Arcadia ego.

At the Gallagher, Bastianich NYC restaurant Becco we recently had the pleasure of dining at, the consistently classical cuisine was complemented by a nearly 90 bottle list of Italian wines all at $25 (in addition to the Reserve list). This was accompanied by their philosophy - "We created this wine list to remove the inhibition & confusion of price from your wine selection. We encourage you to explore the many styles & great values here."

As a non-wine-expert, I quite liked this concept a lot. It was terrific to see this replicated in a small way at the Shockoe Bottom restaurant Arcadia. Open for a couple of months now at the location formerly occupied by Cafe Gutenberg, it had its brush with Lincoln stardom that had folks atwitter for a bit.
Arcadia's menu features a pretty decent selection of ~15 bottles at $20 and ~15 at $30. Which makes for a nice start.

This "inhibition & confusion of price" reminded me of some of the work in the area of trying to study the correlations between wine and price (courtesy Freakonomics). A couple of years ago, Goldstein et al. (J. Wine Econ., 3(1),1–9, 2008) published a paper entitled "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" They found:
1. People unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. Based on 6000 blind tastings, there was actually a negative correlation between price and rating suggesting that individuals on average seem to enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.

2. Interestingly, for individuals with wine training, however, there is a non-negative relationship between price and enjoyment, which opens up an entire round of questions about the "experts".
For example, with two wines, A and B, $ (Wine A) = 10x $ (Wine B). In terms of a 100-point scale, non-experts would assign an overall rating four points lower for wine A, whereas experts would assign an overall rating seven points higher.

Essentially, they cautioned that non-expert wine consumers (most of us?) should not anticipate greater enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of a wine simply because it is expensive or is appreciated by experts!

The converse question is equally interesting - Does a more expensive wine taste better to a regular person? Not surprisingly, people expect a higher quality with price. But interestingly, research has shown that individuals appreciate the same wine more when they think that it is more expensive (Plassmann et al., PNAS 105(3), 1050–1054, 2008). In the paper "Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness", they used fMRI scans in which people were given differhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifent wines that they were told differed in price. Some of the wines were the same but simply presented with different prices. Prices correlated positively with experienced pleasantness, measured both subjectively and via fMRI experiments.

Ah yes, back to Arcadia....always loved the place in its previous-previous incarnation as CG and I continue to like the space, its very Richmond views, and what the new owners have done with it. The food was good but could use a little kapow !! We didnt have the steak thats proudly advertised. Dinner for two with a couple of shared plates, entrees and a bottle of wine + t&t is close to 3 digits. Perhaps a function of the weekend crowd but be prepared for some high sound levels. The tartufo was delightufo.

(Pretentious titles courtesy Google translate!)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

In museum district memoriam...
Style Weekly

Despite being generally skeptical of the new kid on the block rave syndrome endemic in RVA, experiences at one of the latest entrants into the local dining firmament - The Roosevelt in Church Hill make me abandon circumspection at this musing.
This is a restaurant after my heart in many ways. A casual, spacious room that has seen a lot of time passages (some nicely adorning the walls) and right off the bat, our server reciting the prices on the specials, had me pleased. They did the “simple” perfectly (glazed baby carrots in ginger and OJ sauce, and a delicious crostini with ricotta and beets so good, we had to have a second). After some recently disappointing kolokithokeftedes at a place that shall not be named (cf. syndrome above), the black-eyed pea variety at TR was a reminder on how fritters are really done. AND they delivered nicely on the “complex” - a melding of flavors on the entrees, all largely southern inspired, a lot of VA represented all over. Further, I was generally impressed by the lack of pretension at this restaurant, admonitions at “drink slinging” notwithstanding. One can only hope that the freshness of a rotating, seasonal menu and a hitting of the maturity groove keeps making this place better.
We left the TR the best way I like to leave – the mind full and a stomach full to just the right degree (and a wallet not empty either - several sides, snacks and dessert (the oft raved about panna cotta in the mason jars is all that), can be had for $4-$5, entrees topping out <$20).

If I have one “quasi-complaint” about the Roosevelt, it has to be on the difficulty of getting a table !:) 30-45 min waits have led to disappointment twice ! Be prepared as the word spreads.