macrosan

So I pop in for a welcome dose of nostalgia, and this is where I alight You're right - LeB was the subject of the very first post here ... and well before that (dare I say this) it was the location of my first ever attendance at an eGullet meet-up in New York!!!!! Good to see you still here, Wilf. And now I shall wander my way round the site ... again

Almost all fonts in current use use variable spacing. I believe that fixed spacing fonts fundamentally disappeared with manual typewriters. And while I'm here, I'd like to suggest en passant (to employ a much used English phrase) that "business speak" should have a thread of its own. It has little to do with the English language.

I have to say that that menu for 13th/14th is only the second tasting menu I have ever seen anywhere which makes me salivate There's not a single course that sounds anything less than wonderful. What a pity I can't make those dates

Thanks Wilf 2011 was a long hard year, but now I have free time again

Thanks for finding this for me, Oakapple For some reason it wasn't listed when I did a search And thanks to whomever merged my post in. Service is good as ever at MF

I haven't been to Le Bernardin for ever such a long time. I remember it as the second ever eGullet "event", where I first met (amongst others) the famed Joel Baumwoll I loved the meal, as I did a couple more in the ensuing years. Now I think I'd like to go again in a few weeks, but has it maintained its game? I'm struggling to find recent reviews. Or is there somewhere better for a top-class fish meal?

I discarded Maialino because of its very idiosyncratic and (to me) unattractive menu. Balthazar got the vote, and I'm glad it did Check-in was hectic - I guess about 20 people turned up at the same time and there wasn't much space to stand in while we waited for attention. But from there on it was all upward. Very nicely thought out table for three - a small table on a corner banquette with one extra chair. A little crowded, maybe, but great for chatting. A cheerful and helpful server, exactly on that fine line between "proper" and "friendly". We all loved the menu - my gue

My hotel loaned me an umbrella for the duration of my stay, which I found very useful. I have now suggested they additionally offer a cattle prod.

Oh I wasn't really having a dig at you, Anthony, just taking your post as an excuse to represent my frustration And of course it is everyone's right, and perhaps even duty, to hassle Lex

In my case it came before. Firstly, these aren't kids, they're "youngsters" which from my perspective means people in the 18-30 age group So actually they're not of an age where they are normally throwing balls in other people's yards I can understand the thoughtless bit - they're having a night out, they're forced out of the bars so they can smoke whatever kind of weeds they choose to smoke tonight; it's really, really, really intellectually demanding for them in their hazy condition to understand that the sidewalk hasn't been provided specially as a playground for them and that

It was a lovely evening That butter-braised onion dip was astonishingly more-ish. Cathy is right that they either need to loosen the mixture a little or else provide entirely sturdier dipping devices than the crumbly (but very delicious) game chips that were given to us. The positively pragmatic proprietor of the Pink Pig (allit.) cheated by using his fork to load the chips with dip, but surely that was quite outside the bounds of decent behavior at table. No, sturdier chips or looser dip must be provided in future. I couldn't look past the fried chicken, which I had been anticipat

I'm staying in a LES hotel, and the worst noise I came across was Sunday morning at 5am when two young guys staying in the room next door woke me up by turning up their radio to full and singing along with some particularly raucous music ... and giggling a lot and very loudly! Then on Monday morning at 3.15am I heard the screaming of a young woman in that same room obviously being murdered, but it turned out to be a different form of activity. I walk back to my hotel regularly between 11pm and 2am, and I just don't encounter a lot of noise. The worst problem is crowds of youngsters sta

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm studying them now

Thanks, Steve and Suzanne That's exactly what I need to know.

I'm meeting a couple of (American) relatives on Sunday October 3, and we'd like to go for brunch in LES/Soho/East Village. We haven't met up for a few years. so I want a place where we can relax comfortably and talk (so no close-packed tables or noisy crowd) and also get a really nice meal I have no idea what my relatives' eating preferences are, so I need to play safe ... maybe American or French or Italian. And of course I need somewhere that I can book at less than a week's notice. The only easy bit is that price is not important

I'm going to be in town next week and I'm planning to introduce a couple of friends to a real fried chicken dinner If we're a three, will I need to book and/or what is a good time to walk in, say on Wednesday or Thursday?

Hey, in England what with the recession and all, any food is good food. When I walked into St John last Tuesday, all the food was used up and I had to order the Chilled Newspaper Pulp Soup followed by Braised Shoe Soles with Refried Goats' Turds and Dandelion Mash. Oh how I wish I'd had what you had

That was the most exciting Superbowl I can remember watching, marred only by the way-past-their-sell-by-date "performance" at half-time. Who dat indeed !!!!!

Technology poses an impossible dilemma. As technology improves, practitioners come to rely on it more. They stop practising fundamental skills, which forces them to rely even more on technology. Finally, they become totally dependent on the technology and eventually will even cease to be trained in the fundamentals. When the technology goes wrong, and it does and it will, there is no alternative. This is a problem not just in medicine.

Oh my goodness, yah-boo-sucks, what a clever little boy you try to be I bet that goes down really well in the school playground I find it continually astonishing how much time you spend saying so little

Well that's just the LML monochromatic yes-or-no style of argument. You see everything in extremes, and simply reduce what others say to your own extreme taste. That's not what I'm suggesting, and you know that's not what I'm suggesting (because I have already explained what I'm suggesting in a way which even you will understand). Instead of wasting your time deliberately distorting what others say, why not try and justify your own rather specialised world view?

I'm not sure how one parses a Muslim If you're asking how security identifies whether or not someone is a Muslim, there are a variety of ways, ranging from the inelligent one that Mongo has suggested above to the pretty blunt statistical method of selecting people from Muslim countries as being more likely to be Muslim than those from non-Muslim countries. If, further, you're suggesting that parsing Muslims is a singular feature of profiling, then that's not what anyone on my side of the argument is suggesting. The range of profiles to be applied has to be the range of profiles which

Absolutely so. The Catch 22 is that the only people who can do the job of the security services are people you wouldn't want as your next door neighbour. They have to be willing to lie, cheat, assault, kill and all those other things that we don't like. So of course it's dangerous to give them information about people, and if they don't get that information then they can't do the job we expect them to do. But if we do give them the information, we can't trust them to use it properly because they're the sort of people who lie, cheat, assault and kill. We have to choose.

No you didn't. But if you'd read all the posts slowly you might have learned that profiling would have helped catch the Nigerian dude

Now don't be facetious I'm suggesting that the term "human rights" has become meaningless, and is now presumed by some to extend to all human activity and existence. What is needed is a realistic balance between what human rights are construed to include and the reasonable needs of security. In the instance I quoted, I take the view that anyone whose past activities included those of Abdulmutallab must inevitably forfeit the "right" of privacy from the world's security services. He brings that upon himself by his association with Muslim fundamentalists. Some "human rights" a