Marginal Revolution

Singapore markets in everything

...the restaurant is designed from top to bottom in a medical theme. wheelchairs, hospital beds, operating lights, test tubes and more, the design is completely off the wall. The interior is far more subtle than the al fresco seating out front.

It's called The Clinic and here is more information, and photos, including information on one of its tastiest dishes.  Here is their imaginative website.  Here is a floor plan with two excellent photos.  You sit in wheelchairs and drink out of IV bags. 

How to think about Iranian food

Sadly, I've never been to Iran, though I would love to go.  Here are a few tips for the Iranian food I've had elsewhere:

1. A good koresh (stew) almost always beats a good kabob.  Ghormeh sabzi and bademjan are national treasures.

2. The choice of rice is a central decision.  Get zereshk polo -- barberry rice -- as much as you can.  Or get cherry rice, rice with pistachio, etc.  All those choices are winners.

3. Lamb shank can end up being dull in a Persian restaurant.  If served with dill the dish is often too dry.

4. Fesanjan, fesanjan, fesanjan.  In Iceland I once ate fesenjan guillemot.  The fesenjan in a can that you find in Persian groceries is actually pretty good.

5. Don't be afraid to smear mast-o-moseer (or musir; the spellings and transliterations vary, as with many of these dishes) into your rice.  Always order mast-o-moseer.

6. Soups are excellent, especially if they are fragrant and have noodle-like entities.  Soups without barley are usually better than soups with barley.

7. In this country Westwood, Los Angeles has the best Iranian food overall.  Check out Westwood Ave. and also Pico.

8. If you are in a country where you do not expect to see Persian food, and you see Persian food, it is usually very good.  As a partial exception to a rule of good eating, a single Persian restaurant can be very good even if there are not other Persian restaurants around.

Fearless Critic

The subtitle is Washington DC Area Restaurant Guide and the author is Robin Goldstein.  I am a Contributing Editor and yes he did listen to my most valuable pieces of advice.  Described as "brutally honest," this is much, much better than Zagat's and the like.  It is the best book of its kind.

Elsewhere on the new book front, there is Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss (I hope to review it) and Robert Wright's The Evolution of God; there is some chance I will be doing a BloggingHeads with Wright on this book.

How Cooking Made Us Human

How much can you hate a book that has sentences like these?:

Instinctotherapists, a minority group among raw-foodists, believe that because we are closely related to apes we should model our eating behavior on theirs.

In fact I liked the book -- How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham -- very much.  Here is a good review of the book.  The one sentence version is:

We are cooks more than carnivores.

I also liked this fragment:

...a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies...

Here is a strange and wild critique of Instinctotherapy.

Yummy yum yum at Krispy Kreme doughnuts

Since I live in a county dedicated to the rule of law, I was not surprised to read this:

You know Krispy Kreme doughnuts are bad for your arteries. But the delectable sugar-bombs are apparently lousy for sewer pipes as well, according to Fairfax County.

In a lawsuit filed this month against the company, the county says that doughnut grease and other waste from a plant in Lorton have clogged up the county's sewage system, causing $2 million in damage. The county is seeking to recoup the cost of the repairs and another $17 million in civil penalties.

The problems began in 2004, shortly after the plant opened, when the county's public works inspectors began noticing "deposits of doughnut grease and slime emanating from Krispy Kreme's doughnut production plant," according to the suit, which was first reported by the Examiner.

The muck got so bad that a nearby pumping station began reeking of doughnuts, and a camera inserted into one of the pipes "got stuck in the grease, preventing inspection of the remainder of the line," according to the suit.

One of these days, maybe when the economic crisis is over, I will spend a week blogging Fairfax County rather than the nation at large.

Robin Goldstein is excellent

He writes to me:

Also wanted to let you know that I've just started a new blog, "Blind Taste" (http://blindtaste.com), which covers the food and wine worlds from an edgy, unusual  perspective that draws from neuroscience, economics, and, of course, gonzo journalism.

If you will recall, he is one of the guys who wrote the paper about pâté and dog food.  Robin Goldstein and I once sat down over pescado saltado to compare notes on D.C. (and global) food and, while you cannot take me as speaking for him in any formal sense, we agreed to an astonishing degree.  Here is his critique of molecular gastronomy.

Defining Fat Down

Americans are more overweight than ever but Burke, Heiland and Nadler find:

...that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling for objective weight status and other factors....The shifts in self classification are not explained by differences between surveys in body fatness or waist circumference, nor by shifting demographics. We interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms related to body weight, and propose various mechanisms to explain such a shift, including: (1) higher average adult BMI and adult obesity rates in the later survey cohort, (2) higher childhood obesity rates in the later survey cohort, and (3) public education campaigns promoting healthy body image. The welfare implications of the observed trends in self-classification are mixed.

Hat tip to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.

The decline of chewing

According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.

That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.  This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic.  It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date.  I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.

Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:

Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces, determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the notion that food should melt in the mouth .

Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not collaborating in their own cultural demise?”

...According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time — usually between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C — by 60 seconds or more in search of a less crusty crust.

The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness, that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.

Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.

Standard dishes for testing the quality of a restaurant

Joshua Johnson, a loyal MR (and TCEDG) reader, asks:

If you are going to a new ethnic restaurant, what staple items do you order that for you, let you know if the restaurant is worth coming back to and trying more of their offerings? It would be nice if you could make some sort of list for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Turkish, etc.

Here goes:

Japanese: One bite of the tempura tells all.

Chinese: Ma Po Tofu, or for some kinds of Chinese places Hainan Chicken with Rice.

Thai: Almost any dish shows the true colors of a Thai restaurant immediately.

Turkish: Doner Kebab, taking special care to ponder the tanginess of the yogurt and how it interacts with the meat.

Vietnamese: Anything with lemon grass, which is hard to use well.

Ethiopian: Kitfo or barring that lamb tibs.

Peruvian: Lomo saltado, taking special care to check for the right amount of cilantro in the sauce and the correct sogginess of the french fries.

Bolivian: Silpancho, and check the liquidity and consistency of the egg on top.

Afghan: Kadu (pumpkin) and is it too sweet?

Korean: Seafood pancake and in general the quality of their kimchees.

Indian: Most dishes will do (see "Thai"), although avoid the Butter Chicken as a metric of quality.  Lamb with spinach is my do-or-die default judgment dish for an Indian restaurant, if only because you get to taste both the lamb (less likely to be tender than the chicken) and the spinach.

Restaurant, general: How's their chili crab?  If it's not outstanding, or not on the menu, press eject immediately and get yourself to a different country.

Can you think of others?

Why is it so hard to hug?

Gretchen Rubin reports:

After I looked at my list, however, I realized that I’d never made a specific resolution to “Kiss more, hug more, touch more.” So I’ve added that to my ever-growing list of resolutions.

This is intriguing, precisely because it strikes a chord with so many people.  Why exactly do so many people need a "nudge" to hug more?  There is evidence that hugging is both fun and good for us.  What is it about hugging that is so often resisted?

Oddly, many people wish to be hugged by Florence Henderson.

I am reminded of my old post on why people don't have more sex with each other than they do.  Fortunately, I have solved this problem and if you keep on reading MR for enough years you will learn my answer.