taion

I think the opera enhanced my drinking experience a decent bit.

The Lady Eve at at Film Forum's Preston Sturges series. I need to watch more screwball comedies. Though I don't see the point of playing mediocre 35 mm prints... well, not a problem I have at home, anyway.

At least the Lincoln Center PJ Clarke's stays open past 10 PM now.

The thing that did it for me was realizing that the VT location of our local bougie grocery chain has a much better selection of beer than the NH locations. To the contrary, I enjoyed Tosca for the first time ever earlier this season, thanks to the simple expedient of having 2 or 3 Manhattans before curtain and more at intermission.

I like Mark Fisher, but not enough to read K-punk. This piece in his memory made me think of this thread: https://areomagazine.com/2023/01/18/the-great-reboot-in-memoriam-mark-fisher/. Has "global techno-capitalism" been mentioned in this thread yet? There are quite a lot of pages here. Fisher's hope for VR and the metaverse seems so quaint as to no longer even be charming.

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.

Then again, we probably don't want to posit too strong a discontinuity between Montreal having so many restaurants per capita in 1951 per the Maclean's account versus what we see now.

I think this is a bit of a just-so story. Snack shacks aren't exactly serving premium local produce. I bet a lot of this is just that Quebec (along with most of Canada and Europe) are just quite poor by American standards.

Hey, we were staying in the Old City too!

I think you're making sort of a category error if you're comparing the value of TT and IG followers, and anyway distribution is way less coupled to follower count on TT than on IG.

Predictably excellent meals at Mon Lapin and Beba. I liked the former more. My wife liked the latter more. I really do wonder why it's so much more fun to eat out in Montreal than in New York. I was talking to @Sneakeater off-board about this – I'd need to know more about Montreal food history, but the abject poverty of Francophones seems to preclude drawing any sort of straight line between "people here speak French" to the current dining scene. There's a MacLean's piece from 1951 talking about how great the Montreal food scene was even then, but it doesn't make the food scene sound all