taion

Pre-theater is probably quite a lot more popular than post-theater, even for people not driving in from the suburbs, surely?

A big part of my issue here is that we're visiting in 2 weekends, but only confirmed that we were doing this trip a couple of days ago – which evidently seems incompatible with booking Friday or Saturday night reservations anywhere good, unless any of those are really feasible for early (or late) walk-ins.

Dreyfus looks like I should just go to Montreal instead.

Are, um, Canoe and/or Bar Isabel any good still? Planning a trip in a couple of weekends, which means it's a bit too last-minute to book anywhere cooler.

I was happy enough with the selection at the Union Square Whole Foods, especially given the prices.

Something to do with perishability and number of SKUs? Or that many of these places double as bars and don’t want to undercut themselves? In places where both supermarkets and wine stores sell wine, it’s not like the supermarkets are cheaper for apples-to-apples product.

Wow. Yeah, you’re right. So the price difference really is between specialist retailers here and … normal stores that have the same product at half the price. Weird.

Right but I’d expect bar prices at a ballgame. My question is why specialty beer specifically is conspicuously more expensive at retail in NYC than elsewhere, even though comparable products like wine don’t show this skew.

Why is beer so expensive in New York? Almost everything else – including wine – is comparably priced to what I can get in Vermont or New Hampshire, but the best options for interesting beers seem to be the specialty shops that charge like 6–10$ a can, which is twice (or more) what I pay in New England. Am I shopping at the wrong places? The premium here just for beer specifically is so weird.

Do any of the Cali koshihikari producers vacuum-pack their rice?

That cannot actually be easier than just buying rice from TRF, though.

Looks... like rice?

We got some nice-looking fruit at the Jean Talon market and it was above-average by NY standards at best. Maybe we bought wrong. Do we really think it's a matter of there being a real "deep" food culture there, or is it more a matter of looking toward Paris rather than New York, especially at the mid level? For that matter, how good were Lespinasse-and-earlier restaurants in New York? I was never there for that.

Is mill-to-order rice from https://trf-ny.com/ worth it? It sounds so stupid on the face of it.

To be fair, someone from the 1930s would have the same sentiment about the UES, only much moreso.