"When [Emily Alexander] moved to Massachusetts in September, she said, she was 'very surprised' to find out happy hours were forbidden here."

"'I’m a grad student; I can’t afford a bunch of drinks,' said Ms. Alexander, 23. 'So I’d love it if they [lifted the ban]. I have a ton of friends in D.C., and that’s what they do after work."

Indeed they do.

(h/t: Reason)

So DC Is Making Beer Now! But Wait... Why Aren't We Getting Cheaper Prices?, Cont.

Jeff Alworth of Beervana isn't so impressed with Tammy Tuck's City Paper piece, which I wrote about last week:

A magnum opus on beer pricing, and we come up with no real explanation. My guess is this: craft beer is in its novel, exotic phase in DC and there isn't a huge amount of competition. As a consequence, the small group of consumers who are supporting the local breweries are willing to shell out a huge premium on a price of beer. If the market were healthier, bigger, and more competitive, those prices would drop like a stone.

If that's true, it seems beer-loving Washingtonian entrepreneurs need to get to work opening up more breweries.

"[Eli Lehrer] argues that 'molecular gastronomy' will be the ruin of fine dining in the District. He singles out my restaurant, Rogue 24... I would like the chance to respond..."

"All cooking is essentially manipulating molecules and any first year culinary student who has watched bread rise knows this to be true."

So DC Is Making Beer Now! But Wait... Why Aren't We Getting Cheaper Prices?

Tammy Tuck of City Paper tries to understand why the prices of local craft beers are so high in the District compared to notoriously expensive cities like San Fransisco:

"Ask craft-beer folks about prices and they tend to stress their product’s artisan quality. Of course you can find some cheaper swill, the logic goes. But it’ll be made with rice or corn instead of barley and other fine grains. A can of National Bohemian, for instance, will set you back just $3 at Smoke & Barrel—and a mere $2 at the Raven. To craft devotees, that’s like opting for a McDonald’s burger."

Ok, so good things cost money. But, surely it wasn't always like this, right?

"The modern craft beer movement began in California. Pioneering breweries, like Anchor and Sierra Nevada, have been in operation since the late ’70s and early ’80s, when lower-priced mass market brews set the tone for the industry. In contrast, D.C.’s beer scene came of age much later and grew out of the rising popularity of Belgian beers, which tend to fetch higher prices to begin with."

But what about the global brewing giants? It's not unusual for a mega-corporation to exert influence in the market. Tuck explains:

"Another big factor impacting the price of craft beer at the distributor level is the bigfooting influence of Big Beer [...] In other words, when the price of Blue Moon, a Coors product, goes up a buck, your beloved Bell’s Two Hearted Ale may suddenly suck up another one of your singles, too."

Ah, so maybe if we examine the distributor level of the business we can find some answers for consumers. What about them? Aren't they being a little greedy?

"Craft aficionados, of course, love to gripe about the middleman. And it makes sense: The distributor isn’t anyone’s beloved local beer bar, and he’s not anyone’s innovative craft brewer, either."

Unfortunately, the new wave of establishments that we love and which bring vitality to so many Washington D.C. neighborhoods may have a part to play in the price:

"every one of the complaints leveled against wholesalers and distributors could be leveled in other markets too. To understand D.C.’s price situation, it makes more sense to look at those snazzy, beer-focused taverns that have sprung up here over the past decade"

Not surprisingly, the upward trend ultimately rests on the consumers themselves:

"The District’s neighborhood politics—which make it very easy for local residents to get in the way of liquor licenses, adding new costs for retailers—also pushes prices above where they’d be elsewhere. Washington may have seen a gastro-pub population boom, but many of those births required tavern owners to hire pricey lawyers to navigate Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, who are able to wring sometimes costly concessions from new establishments. The overall effect also reduces competition."

As a former bartender at Tonic at Quigley's Pharmacy when they spent a year struggling for a liquor license, I had a window into the political side of all this. DC's ostensibly grass-roots neighborhood governing system presented more than a few hurdles for Tonic's owners in 2008. 

And while few people openly complain, there have been comments made mostly by tourists and out-of-towners in Tonic about the cost of fare and booze seeming a bit excessive. But what are the owners going to do when they have more than a year's worth of legal bills?

Hopefully, I'll be able to bring a little more perspective on the District's growing beer industry in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Slate's Farhad Manjoo Is Sick of Your Restaurant's Terrible Website

Farhan Manjoo really wants restaurateurs to bring more common sense to their restaurant's web presence. He begins his Slate piece (titled "Overdone: Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?,") by chopping at Fleur de Lys' obnoxious website. He writes:

"The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lys is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller's autograph. That makes sense—when I'm choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is, Can the chef sign his name?"

BURN. Read up on the other scathing website critiques by Manjoo as well as those websites that he gives a solid passing grade. They are quite entertaining.

Washington Man Takes Notice of DLDGLG

I am man, hear me roar.

If today's your first day, it may surprise you to know that gentlemen are big fans of booze. So naturally, Washington Man, an independent capital area online magazine for chaps, kindly recommended DLDGLG to its readers this week.

Today, I compiled a list of notable quotes made by famous blokes (or commonly attributed to them) about alcohol. And they've been arranged by their approximate time period.

(Did I miss a good one? Share a quote in the comments below.)

"Wine is sunlight, held together by water."
- Galileo Galilei

"Better belly burst than good liquor be lost."
- Jonathan Swift

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
- commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin

"Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew."
- Charles Dickens

"Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune."
- Giuseppe Garibaldi

"Wine is bottled poetry."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."
- Oscar Wilde

"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober."
- William Butler Yeats

"A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her."
- W.C. Fields

"Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water."
- W.C. Fields

“A horrid alcoholic explosion scatters all my good intentions like bits of limbs and clothes over the doorsteps and into the saloon bars of the tawdriest pubs”
- Dylan Thomas

"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."
- Winston Churchill

"Yes, madam, I am drunk. But in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."
- Winston Churchill

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief."
- Ernest Hemingway

"I feel sorry for people who don't drink.  When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day."
- Frank Sinatra

"I'll stick with gin.  Champagne is just ginger ale that knows somebody."
- Hawkeye, M*A*S*H 1973

"You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER."
- Frank Zappa

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
- Hunter S Thompson

"If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat - in other words, turn you into an adult."
- P.J. O'Rourke

"Alcoholism is the only disease that you can get yelled at for having."
- Mitch Hedberg

"Beer is the cause and solution to all of life's problems."
- Homer Simpson

Visit WM often and keep an eye out for DLDGLG content in its continuing coverage of the exclusive interests of dudes.

"In 'Medium Raw' you write about your attempts to make your daughter hate McDonald's. I am curious to know how that is working...", Cont.

Anthony Bourdain answered the top ten questions posted in an AMA on reddit as I mentioned a few weeks ago. The whole segment is embedded at the end of this post. 

My guess is that the video was produced in anticipation of the new episode of No Reservations in Cuba which aired last week.

I had an opportunity to watch the response before it was taken down for audio adjustments. During that time, I thought about an unexpected answer to one of the questions posed to Tony (at 16:51). This reddit user asks:

"Who is Anthony really? You mock the Food Network and loath the culture that it has created around food, yet you appear as special guest Judge on multiple Top Chefs. You despise 'Foodies', yet you are one of the main inspirations for a new generation of 'Foodies'. Is there an internal struggle? Are you ever on the verge of saying 'fuck this', and opening a restaurant under a pseudonym (so the food, not your name, speaks for itself), where no one is allowed in the kitchen, and sous-chefs sign a non-disclosure form? Do you still have the passion to develop and experiment with new recipes?"

First, reddit fans around the world were probably thrilled that the chef expressed in the video an appreciation of the inquirer's username, "Drink Alone," which is an obvious reference to the "Forever Alone" rage comic meme.

Second, and more notably, Tony's response reveals either his full assimilation into the craft of television or a visceral revulsion to the inner-workings of the restaurant industry itself. 

I also see the motivation for this response as being due in part to the crushing pressure of industry critique. 

Certainly, Bourdain could pursue both endeavors and conceivably find equal success. Tom Colicchio does - among others in the industry. It's a shame that he's not interested.

But Tony seems to confirm the ambivalent feelings regarding ownership of an establishment in the service industry. For some, it's rewards don't seems so rewarding. It's difficulties seem so uncompromising. 

Anyway, the video returned this past week. Watch the whole response and catch the critical quote which starts at 19:24:

"Listen... twenty-eight years standing on my feet in the restaurant business... I mean I'm a good chef at best and a good solid cook. But you don't know my name 'cuz of my food. I had twenty-eight years of it, I'm fifty-five now. I'd be kidding myself, and everybody else, if I pretended to really have much to offer in the way of cuisine. So no, I think I will live with this self loathing, the indignity and all the other stuff that comes with whatever it is I'm doing. I will take the bad with the good and go forward. Cooking? No, If I learned one thing about the restaurant business at twenty-eight years in the restaurant business it's that I never want to be in the restaurant business as an owner of any venture involving food."

Note: This post has been revised since its original publication

Food Porn FAIL

Terrible form with the bowl but textbook duckface. 

Cheers!

(Hat tip: reddit)

"In Medium Raw you write about your attempts to make your daughter hate McDonald's. I am curious to know how that is working..."

An Anthony Bourdain AMA has been posted on reddit. Supposedly, Tony will be answering the highest rated questions on video next Wednesday after midnight EST. The video will be posted the following week. I, for one, will be very interested to hear the chef's answers.

Parenthetically, I noticed a minor discussion about a complicated moment that happens to be one of my favorites from No Reservations. Bourdain was in Haiti after the earthquake. A segment captures the chaos the chef caused trying impulsively to feed hungry Hatians. A redditor named tuftington quotes Tony's narration in the thread: 

"What happens is both predictable and a metaphor for what's wrong with so much well-intentioned aid effort around the world. Hungry people anywhere behave like hungry people. When you've got big kids and small kids, young people and old, many of whom haven't had a meal in days, in the real world, outside of the commercial in our heads, people get whacked with a belt. A struggle to keep order against the natural forces of the world, the strong against the weak."

The scene was heartbreaking but provoked some healthy reflection. It's those moments, among others over the years, that make the show stand out. 

I look forward to viewing Bourdain's AMA video response next week.

(Hat tip: Marcus)

UPDATE #1: Anthony Bourdain made a video answering the top 10 questions. It was posted but then taken down because of technical difficulties but will be back. A new post on this video will be coming soon.

UPDATE #2: the new post is up.

"Liu wrote that the restaurant served food that was too salty..."

"The judge also ruled that Liu should not have criticized all the restaurant’s food as too salty because she only had one dish on her single visit."

Taiwan jails a food blogger. True story.

(hat tip: TDW)

Is There More Than Meets The Eye in Tipping?

NPR ran a segment yesterday that attempted to get at the heart of American tipping culture. Planet Money's Caitlin Kenney examines the more visceral questions that are typically underlying the discussions about gratuity. 

Bartenders know all-too-well the various forms that question can take, such as, "why, for the love of all that's holy, do some customers give less than 15% tip on perfectly good service?" At first, Kenney seems interested in providing an answer here:

"Studies show that the size of the tip doesn't have much to do with the quality of service. The weather, how sunny it is, what kind of mood people are in, these factors matter just as much as how satisfied the customers are with the service they receive."

Jessica Gibson, a waiter at an Irish pub in Tulsa, Oklahoma, believes that the harder she works, the greater her tips are. Yet she also admits that when she's a customer, she always leaves a 20% tip, even if the service is terrible.

Like most people, Jessica tips pretty much the same amount no matter what."

This revelation is not new. Anyone in the service industry can tell you that seemingly frivolous circumstances can have a disappointing result on one's tip jar. That's why many seasoned FOH staff in restaurants across the country likely bank his or her income on a synthesis of great service and customer volume.

But Kenney isn't actually interested in how clientele tip. She really wants to know:

"if we don't tip to get better service, why do we it?

"Michael Lynn, a professor at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration and [I love this] a former waiter at Pizza Hut, says there is another explanation: We tip because we feel guilty about having people wait on us. It's a way of saying: 'Here, have on drink on me when you're done working.'

This is the social pressure theory of tipping, an idea first put forward by anthropologist George Foster.

This theory explains why we tip some people but not others. We tend to tip in places where we're having a lot more fun than the people who are serving us: bars, restaurants, cruise ships. But we usually don't tip in grocery stores or dentist's offices."

That last part made me think back to the scene in Resevior Dogs where Steve Buscemi's character, Mr. Pink, refuses to leave a couple bucks for the waitress and Harvey Keitel's character, Mr. White, attempts to convey a sobering perspective to convince Mr. Pink otherwise (NSFW).

Incidentally, who the hell drinks six cups of coffee? Anyway,the implications of Foster's hypothesis seem to suggest that guilt, empathy, or even pure altruism, was a significant element to the formation of the tipping culture Americans are familiar with today. That would seem to contradict the idea that the market forces influenced the American tipping system (i.e. good service begets a good tip). 

What are your thoughts on Foster's theory? When you stop to think about it, do you truly determine the appropriate gratuity based on some instinctive performance evaluation at the end of the meal? Is it even possible to keep a full tally of mistakes or exceeded expectations during the visit? If this theory is true and you worked in the service industry, would this change your perspective on why you are tipped in the first place?  

Say It Ain't So...

One sight that I would liked to have seen was Sax lounge's blasphemous and taboo murals. I read the reviews and the place seemed devilish and fun.

Unfortunately, pressure forced the owners to tone down the vivid images significantly. I guess it was fun while it lasted.

So This Happened Today...

Sláinte!

Good for Ollie Hayes Pub. Reddit has the entire Ireland trip.

Your Local Government at Work

The DCist reports that the D.C. Council voted on emergency legislation to extend drinking hours for bars on March 13th. The measure was introduced ostensibly to recuperate revenue that will be lost as a result of the daylight savings shift on March 14th. Obviously, if your favorite saloon is participating, this extension will provide you with more quality time in front of some hooch. Start carb-loading now folks.

2011 Extended Hours Calendar

Incidentally, I wonder if the DC Council will insist that the subway remain open for those late-late night folks who will get sloshed and try to venture home? Well, if you are one who agrees with Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority general manager Richard Sarles, people shouldn't even be drunk on the trains in the first place.

BYOW in the Commonwealth of Virginia

A bill has been passed by the Virginia House of Delegates which allows patrons to bring their own bottle of wine to restaurants. Endorsed by the RAMW, the measure will likely create a fee that customers pay to the restaurant for corkage. Indeed, it appears that this development is a positive one for the consumer. And while I have never felt the need to bring a bottle of my own vino into an establishment, I surely know someone who probably has.

When passed into law, however, this provision will initially pose some interesting and challenging scenarios for the average Virginia restaurant worker. There will be the occasional guest who attempts to abuse the system. What if the customer brings an excessive amount of wine? What if the customer refuses the corkage fee?

Both the DCist and Food & Wine Magazine Online have great articles addressing customer etiquette and best-practices when bringing your own wine and facing a corkage policy. If you anticipate taking advantage of this privilege as a customer, you should read up and take note of the protocol. Don't be the one who brings in the same bottle of wine that is already offered on the menu.

The Ohio Restaurant Question

Washington City Paper had an interesting piece on an H street property that has gone through a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I don't normally burrow into commercial real estate on this blog. However, this particular space was going to be the newest addition to the Tonic family, according to a former general manager. Now, it seems, the old Ohio Restaurant is very much up for sale. I guess the only question now is if there be any suitors.

And Billy Dee Williams wept...

So long Peter J Marcher Jr, master brewer of Colt 45, who died today.

They were right. It really does work every time.

Meet the beer that has an ABV at 41%

It's called Sink the Bismarck. One bottle just might render you unfit to drive.

Sink the Bismarck! from BrewDog on Vimeo.

And I want one.

(hat tip: Daily Mail)

Wine Josh bait

For your sorrows.



(hat tip: Daily What)

Where Is Molecular Gastronomy Now?

I watched "cheftestant" and borderline schizophrenic, Marcel Vigneron, set the molecular gastronomy movement back ten years on this season's Top Chef All-Stars. I had hoped a sensible voice would rise up to reclaim the professionalism that made this technique a viable and exciting culinary approach. Well NPR's Marketplace stepped in and did a segment discussing former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's six volume behemoth which mainly focuses on this fairly new scientific view and understanding of food. Stephen Dubner's analysis of the books and Myhrvold's intent is refreshing. I don't, however, find the invention of the microwave oven or canned goods as the best demonstration as to how science can improve food.