Why We're Not Talkin'

[joethefoodie]

It's been bemoaned in another thread, that not a lot of discussion takes place here, particularly after someone posts about their experience at a restaurant.

Is it, as George once implied...

 "I guess the reason we're not talkin', there's so little left to say we haven't said..."

I kind of doubt that, since no one here I know is ever short of words. 

Thoughts about it? 

[Anthony Bonner]

Ain't got nothin to talk about. Unless you want to hear me complain about NJ food.

[Miguel Gierbolini]

I would certainly welcome more talking about restaurants or whatever or even New Jersey food.

[rozrapp]

3 hours ago, Anthony Bonner said:

Ain't got nothin to talk about. Unless you want to hear me complain about NJ food.

What exactly is your complaint? Might it be because of where in NJ you live and what restaurants are nearby? Or how far you are willing to travel to eat?

Since we don’t go to NYC as regularly as we used to pre-pandemic, we rely mainly on NJ restaurants for dining out. Fortunately, we have a variety of very good to excellent restaurants on our list. There is only one that is practically on our doorstep. For the others, we drive from 30 minutes to up to an hour depending on traffic (which is always a factor!). Also, these places meet our requirement for outdoor dining. If that were not an issue, there would be more.

[Orik]

I went to a casual wine bar. The wine menu was revisionist and included some wonderful choices in the $1,500+ range. The food was cooked by someone who doesn't know how to make rillettes. The rillettes were served by someone who wasn't taught how to pronounce them. A

[Anthony Bonner]

What on earth is a revisionist wine menu.

[Anthony Bonner]

On 9/7/2022 at 12:16 PM, rozrapp said:

What exactly is your complaint? Might it be because of where in NJ you live and what restaurants are nearby? Or how far you are willing to travel to eat?

Since we don’t go to NYC as regularly as we used to pre-pandemic, we rely mainly on NJ restaurants for dining out. Fortunately, we have a variety of very good to excellent restaurants on our list. There is only one that is practically on our doorstep. For the others, we drive from 30 minutes to up to an hour depending on traffic (which is always a factor!). Also, these places meet our requirement for outdoor dining. If that were not an issue, there would be more.

Roz it's just not very good. Places that are "The Best in New Jersey" 1) often have the same lame selection of Proteins 2) the cooking itself rarely rises above the "nice little place but not worth a 30 minute journey and drive home after half a bottle of wine level." To be clear other than a few exceptions these aren't bad places per se.  Just kinda lame.

And the next tiers down are miserable.  

I'm actually more agitated at how poor the kind of places I would want to go with my fam on a weeknight after I get back from the city are. Also id like to be able to eat out at 8pm on a weeknight given our schedules.

shitty bagels in this part of state which I guess shame on me for picking a waspy town.

Caveat all this by saying I don't eat out in your part of the state I'm mostly north of 78 and going further East than Montclair probably isn't it worth it for us given my wife and I overlap in the city enough that we can just do that if we want to travel for dinner.

 

[joethefoodie]

41 minutes ago, Anthony Bonner said:

Roz it's just not very good. Places that are "The Best in New Jersey" 1) often have the same lame selection of Proteins 2) the cooking itself rarely rises above the "nice little place but not worth a 30 minute journey and drive home after half a bottle of wine level." To be clear other than a few exceptions these aren't bad places per se.  Just kinda lame.

And the next tiers down are miserable.  

I'm actually more agitated at how poor the kind of places I would want to go with my fam on a weeknight after I get back from the city are. Also id like to be able to eat out at 8pm on a weeknight given our schedules.

shitty bagels in this part of state which I guess shame on me for picking a waspy town.

 

Bergen County, where any number of my in-laws live, isn't much better.  Though the pancakes at the Westwood Diner Pancake House seem to be a hit with my f-i-l.

Dinners I try to avoid at all costs. 

Surprisingly, I found a place with very good bagels.

[Sneakeater]

Are there more than two waitrons in all of New York who know how to pronounce “rillettes”?

[Orik]

2 hours ago, Anthony Bonner said:

What on earth is a revisionist wine menu.

One written as if the past three decades never happened. 

[Tubbs]

7 hours ago, joethefoodie said:

Bergen County, where any number of my in-laws live, isn't much better.  Though the pancakes at the Westwood Diner Pancake House seem to be a hit with my f-i-l.

Dinners I try to avoid at all costs. 

Surprisingly, I found a place with very good bagels.

Best bagels in the country are in Teaneck. 

We just go to Memere in Closter. It's solid and they have a lovely back patio. Suffering a bit from staffing issues like many restaurants so the plates have gotten a bit simpler. 

Plenty of good options for Korean, Cuban, etc, and chicken parm. 

Fort Lee is sprouting sushi omakase joints. Haven't been to many of them yet. 

[Wilfrid]

8 hours ago, Sneakeater said:

Are there more than two waitrons in all of New York who know how to pronounce “rillettes”?

What I always love is when I pronounce something correctly and the server repeats it back to me wrong (as if they know better).

But I do give the bartender at Croquette credit. He positively shivered with pleasure when I ordered the joues de boeuf.

[small h]

1 hour ago, Wilfrid said:

What I always love is when I pronounce something correctly and the server repeats it back to me wrong

Hello, bruschetta!

[voyager]

The young sommelier at a new (now Michelin starred) neighborhood restaurant continued to mention our Marcel Lapierre Morgon as  "La-pee-eh".

[Sneakeater]

You won't believe this, but I was once corrected on "Merlot".