Chez Panisse has its place in culinary history. It’s founder, Alice Waters, is often referred to with a tremendous amount of respect. Founded in 1971, the Berkeley restaurant was one of the first restaurants to emphasize the fresh, local produce available in Northern California, serving only what is in season. Today, that emphasis continues and sustainably farmed ingredients are emphasized. The result is a legendary appreciation of the flavors of local produce that is credited as the birth of California Cuisine.

Looking to celebrate a special occasion, I called the restaurant about making reservations. They only accept reservations a month in advance and I was asking for a date three weeks ahead, but the restaurant was already booked until 9 PM. So, I "settled" for a reservation to the cafe upstairs, which is kinda like "setting" for a Promethea trade when you were hoping to read Watchmen instead. (Obligatory geek reference.)

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Ian Brill notices that there will be a blogging pannel at this year’s San Diego Con. I think I will be making an effort to see this one, though I agree with Scott when he wonders why a discussion into if blogs are "the fanzines of this century" is filled with pros.

(Now, if they’re looking for a blogger who used to participate in fanzines and is attending San Diego… well, ah-hem, right here. Then again Nat Gertler also has a history with fanzines and blogs, too…)
 

Yep, I’m rushing to finish publish this review in June…

Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast is a romance comic strip centered around a gay-owned B&B with several long-term guests who make up the series’ core cast. Kyle’s guests include a closeted minor league baseball player, a teen who was kicked out of his home after coming out, a businessman uninterested in any long-term commitments and a catty social butterfly. Kyle, meanwhile, is reserved and frustrated at the difficulty he’s having finding a compatible man who is seeking a long-term commitment.

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Yikes! I’ve fallen way behind in my blog reading (sigh, and I just discovered the SF Chronicle/Gate’s expanded their RSS feeds, too… more to read) so I’m a bit late in noting that Dave Carter of Yet Another Comics Blog is giving away all three volumes of the Runaways digests.

The deadline is this Friday, July 1, so get working on a paragraph explaining which super-villains your parents would be if they were super-villains. It’ll be fun reading the entries.

Independent Bay Area channel KRON, has started a blog, The Bay Area is Talking. Unlike KPIX’s blogs, which mostly focus on responding to viewer feedback, KRON’s blog will focus on what Bay Area bloggers are saying and linkblog with commentary, a nice compliment to KRON’s local programming like Bay Area Backroads. There’s potential in the concept — I hope TBAiT lives up to it.

Sadly, I’m horrible at those little bits of politeness, they just frequently slip my mind and noting blogiversaries seems to be the latest thing I’ve bad at, probably because I think too much about things that really should be simple. Not too long ago, I got frustrated with myself when I discovered a draft post in my post listings that combined a few blogiversary well-wishes. I guess this is supposed to be an indirect apology to those who’s blogiversaries I failed to wish well.

Anyway. I’m going through a cycle of wanting to break that habit and I want to give a quick shout-out to Tom the Dog for hitting the one-year mark before I get bogged down in trying to find the right way to compliment his work. (I’m the one who holds up the fifth anniversary cards at the office, too, because just writing congratulations and signing my name just isn’t good enough.) I’ve been enjoying Tom’s reviews and his snark especially. Snark that’s more than catty is hard to find these days, there’s just so much bad snark out there, but that’s not the case with Y’know What I Like?

SFist talks to Wendy McClure, who is giving a reading tonight. I’m not familiar with McClure, but it turns out that I’m familiar with her writing, as she does recaps for Television without Pity and did that hilarious tribute to Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. It’s a fun interview that reflects that same snark on the Weight Watchers site.

The Popular Blogger Reality can be cushier than the Writer Reality,
because you aren’t working under contract or deadlines, but then–the
Writer Reality includes money. To be honest, I never had very
glamourous Writer Fantasies because I began my career as a poet, where
most of my fantasies were like, "and then I’ll get a grant and teach community college only part-time."
And the Blogger Reality is that you can be hot shit on the internet but
then you have no idea how to explain that fame to your dear sweet
grandmother, who would like to be proud of you but suspects that this
whole business about the "people inside your computer" is some sad
deluded bullshit. But in the Writer Reality, you can say "I wrote a
book," no matter what kind of book it is, and people will be impressed
for at least thirty seconds.

I’ll have to consider I’m Not the New Me as something to keep my mind occupied on my trip to the Comic Con… Tonight, however, I’ve got friends coming over, so no author event for me.

Belated congratulations on Ian Brill’s one-year blogiversary. I’d like to have something insightful to say about Ian’s blog, but that’d be why it’s taken so long for me to say congrats…

Hmmm, so Ernie Hsiung is looking at turning his blog into a book. I’d like to wish him luck and hope someone picks it up, I’d love to be able to pass on some of his best stories (especially the one where a young Ernie contemplates starvation after a fight at the dinner table begins with dad saying ‘You feed the kids to much, look at how fat that are.’ and ends with ‘Maybe I won’t feed them at all!’) without trying to figure out the right google combination. (I wasn’t able to find that story… Ernie must get some real intersting google search terms — at one point last night I had "fat chinese mom feed site:littleyellowdifferent.com" in my google box. I mean, it’s one thing to get someone seeking beast boy penis randomly finding your site, but when that search term is specific to your site…)

The SF Chronicle considers restaurant dress codes:

"There used to be a certain style here. It wasn’t that button-down New
York banker style; it was a more causal look. Men wore blazers and a nice pair
of slacks." But these days, says (Doug) Biederbeck, San Francisco style might more
aptly be characterized as "super sloppy."

Hubert Keller, chef-owner of the four-star Fleur de Lys, says he has all
but given up enforcing a dress code. "We usually tell our guests that jackets
are appreciated and ties are optional," Keller says, but he concedes that he
rarely turns away diners because of the way they’re dressed. "Unless they show
up in T-shirts and shorts, we seat them."

San Francisco, of course, isn’t the only city where sartorial standards
have slipped. Charlie Trotter, the Chicago chef whose namesake restaurant is
considered one of the finest in the nation, says it’s a trend that is vexing
upscale restaurants from coast to coast.

The problem is a mix of changing attitudes and a struggling economy meaning less power to restaurants:

"The competition is a lot more tight now," says (Roland) Passot. "You can’t afford
to turn people away."

Passot recalls one hot summer day when a man hosting a party of six
showed up at La Folie in shorts. Rather than turn the party away, he seated
them as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. The man ended up spending
about $3,000, or nearly $500 per person.

"Maybe he was just coming off the golf course and didn’t have time to
change," Passot says. "Or maybe he was a guy with a lot of money who thought
he could buy the world. If we turned him away he would have just gone to
another restaurant.

"We don’t want people saying, ‘We went to La Folie and they had a snobby
French attitude.’ "

The article got me to thinking my attitudes towards dining out and dressing. Dressing up is fun sometimes, but even the more expensive restaurants don’t feel like they’re worth the effort of dressing up. Too many are too crowded and too loud to feel like I’m having the kind of special experience that warrants that extra care. There are restaurants here that feel that special, like Jardinare or Chez Panisse, but anyplace large enough to serve more than a hundred people at once just can’t manage that kind of atmosphere no matter how high the prices or how many trendy ingredients are named on the menu.