Good take

on a pretty magical island -- I keep a photo on my desk of our last lunch there, which was absolute perfection.

Ode

to a particular island.

Camera,

meet the world beyond the dinner table. 

MR. KRIST: Sharing a little of yourself is always the best way to go. If you're in a market, buy a little sample of what they're selling, try it, comment on it, and by the time that interchange is over they're smiling and ready when you bring your camera up. The last thing you want to do is try to sneak pictures, because you will get caught.

 

Thinking

in bar graphs and Chinese.

Where the margarita was born

and something else is ending: Amexica. 

Torino, discovered again

But the kicker has to be the most horseshit ever tacked onto a story. How in the world would a writer know what older people were going home to dream about in a city where she can't pronounce the pasta names? (Also like the reference to panini sandwiches. Sorta like frutta fruit. Copy editors need to get out more.) 

$9 million

in venture capital . . . Not enough to hire a copy editor, though: You can search restaurant or restuarants and get different results. 

Last to link

but this is actually quite good, and not just because a friend was involved in its creation. The writing was also missing that weird twee aspect so many manly men down there adopt when addressing a subject once relegated to the women's pages.

They are France, and you can't, too

I abandoned a certain section when I slogged through seven columns of reviews apparently written with one eye on the computer screen, the other on the mirror (you could almost hear the grunts and "You go, girl!"s) and saw: On the web: 20 more. And so I missed a gem. I would give a hat tip to the certain someone who tipped me off, but it is a very small world. . . .

Thinking out of the bottle

Why do I think something this intelligent would take five years to plan in Manhattan and one week in Albany to shoot down? Then again, are there even 12 working water fountains in this borough anymore? We can't even get these. (Filched from Tengrain.)

The pink, surrendered

I deleted this over at the base camp because I realized it really had nothing to do with food, but my standards here are obviously lower. And so it's back by demand, in mildly sanitized form:

This was a bad week for anyone who fancies herself living in a sophisticated city. The streets were overrun with the female equivalent of Fleet Week sailors: strange visitors in look-at-me uniform. (Yes, I know there are girls in the Navy, but the boys are the UPS guys of the military.) I have never seen so many Botero-esque women in skimpier costumes in the sidewalk cafes on Columbus; I can’t even imagine what a Technicolor freak show the Village was. It was as ostentatiously ridiculous as kayaking around Venice. (If I had a driver’s license for any reason but national ID, I would propose a story to La Repubblica on “seeing Manhattan by RV.”) Earth to America: “Sex and the City” was fiction. Teevee. Not even a reality show. The worst thing is this Halloween-in-May parade made me remember a creepy incident on Bleecker Street one night when a guy walked out of Amy’s Bread ahead of me and started harassing two women who did not appear to be from around here: “You think you look sexy? You look like tramps! ‘Buy me drinks and you can [redacted] in my [redacted].’” I don’t think it was Mr. Cindy, either. I guess things could be more unsettling, though. Imagine the streets overrun with Indiana Joneses with enlarged prostates.