Saturday, September 17, 2011

Rules of Avoidance: Restaurants

These are just rules of thumb, and can sometimes be ignored to your great gastronomical enjoyment. But once I thought about it a little (once I was done laughing), I find that they have generally held true in my experience.

{My S.O. thought these up, so as a note to the interested digital archaeologists of the future, the credit for this blog post goes to John Sepulveda.}

When considering where to eat, one should avoid:
  1. Restaurants with "hut", "den" or "shack" in their name. "House" is also suspect. I have never heard of a restaurant with the word "slum" or "tenement" in its title, but if I had I would not want to eat there either*.
  2. Restaurants whose names include their primary menu attraction, such as fish, BBQ, sandwich, or lobster.
  3. Restaurants named after a person who has, in all likelihood, never set foot inside the establishment named after them. Linda's is fine since it is named after local entrepreneur Linda Derschang and she does not yet have so many restaurants that she is not able to go and visit all of them. Marie Callendar's is not.
A hypothetical example of a place you probably don't want to eat is "Bob's Lobster Hut", unless of course Bob is right there in the kitchen boiling the fresh caught lobster and he has an ironic sense of humor.


*Though a place called "The Delicious Apartments" might be pretty cool, especially if it specialized in tapas that you could pick up out of little cubbies connected to the kitchen.

The summer that wasn't

This year started with a cool spring that coasted into a summer of meh. If wanted to be completely accurate, I would call this the summer that came late, but I wanted a title that also referenced how little I've blogged this summer. I could blame the lack of sun, but the real culprits were grad school induced lassitude and sheer laziness for the first month and a half and the 12th Avenue Neighborhood Festival for the month after that. In August and September summer finally arrived, so I was busy rejoicing with the rest of the city and enjoying the late start of circus folk season in Cal Anderson Park.

I will try to make up for my lack of blogging with a flurry of slideshow updates before school starts. After that, it is up to the will of the professors, but I live in hope.