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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

nytimes.com

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#101

Post by ghaff »

analog31 wrote: post #94
xanderlewis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me… Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.

Yeah, especially since the density of flour varies. All the home bakers I know either weigh their flour, or eyeball it like I do and live with the imprecision. I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)

A scale's cheap and if it's in a situation where accuracy matters, I use it if the measurements are given or consult a standard conversion. And as someone in the US I tend to use grams for the purpose to avoid faffing with a combination of units. And I don't even mind at all using US Imperial for many things on a day-to-day basis,

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#102

Post by jazzyjackson »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity

I felt the same way about Eddy Burback's "I ate at every Rainforest Cafe in the Country" [and Canada]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA-bjpKvIw8

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#103

Post by jjmarr »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

You'd love the brilliant parody from The Onion "Porkin' Across America" on his journey to taste pork across the country and destroy his life on camera.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NL9i-Fu15jdlr2KQf_lyhXl...

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#104

Post by pbj1968 »

solveit wrote: post #77
pbj1968 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semaglutide is not a drug taken casually. Speak from experience on this one. :-/

What went wrong?

Complete indifference to food and water that led to fainting and probable heat stroke. Extreme nausea. All mitigated now with medication and forced hydration. Not fun.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#105

Post by fuzztester »

fuzztester wrote: post #53
m463 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

add chocolate and get the perfect click ^H^H^H^H cookbait.

no, I meant an actual famous cookbook. I read about it on hn, actually. it's called something like fat, acid, salt and heat. you can Google it.

>I read about it on hn, actually.

you know, like here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=salt+fat+acid+heat

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#106

Post by fuzztester »

fuzztester wrote: post #23
m463 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but you could just get a suana and use it 4-7 days a week for 20 min > 174 F, which reduces risk of all-cause mortality 66% and come out 17% ahead! :) I suspect portion size and number of dishes with homecooked food. In a restaurant, adding appetizers, side dishes and desserts can be done with a nod. At home, it will take a lot of work to add each dish. But yeah, if you do apples:apples I think restaurants are pai…

>salt, cheese, cream, butter, oil. there is a famous cooking book with a name close to that. ;)

[flagged]

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#107

Post by Johnsorc »

He had reviewed some of the restaurants that I previously opened/ran. He was generally a nice enough, but standoffish guy. I’ll never forget the feeling of realizing he was seated. One of those moments that you train for, and now it was game time . There are all sorts of tricks that people employ, cheat sheets with reviewers photos (there is one unfortunate photo of him that everyone has, it must be on every restaurant office wall in NYC), serving extra dishes to the tables around him (so that he got a look at things he didn’t order but should have), and calling friends to fill an empty dining room when he sat down for example. It was always an awkward interaction, he knew I knew, I knew he knew I knew. I generally think Sifton was a better writer, I appreciate that he reviewed restaurants that weren’t your typical white male chef joints, and I’m happy to see Tejal still doing well out west. I’m particularly excited to read some Mellissa Clark reviews in the meantime.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#108

Post by shkkmo »

harmon wrote: post #67
EGreg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc. You kn…

As I understand it, you can only write off a business's expenses against that business's income, not income from other sources. For example, if you have a W2 income source and you have this business generating losses, you can't take your business losses or write offs and apply them to your W2 income, so you wouldn't really be saving any money as there would be no revenue to write off expenses against. You would need…

I do not believe this is correct. If your business is a "pass through" style of entity, you can indeed deduct losses from other income (up to a point and with various limitations.) Doing too much of this can definitely trigger an audit.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#109

Post by slv77 »

EGreg wrote: post #50
slv77 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have tried and the IRS has even provided a helpful guide on if your endeavor is a hobby or a business ( https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-23.pdf ).

Thanks for this! I didn’t know the guidelines were published. This is like FINCEN’s 2013 and 2019 guidances for cryptocurrencies. “The limit on not-for-profit losses… does not apply to corporations except S Corporations”. It doesn’t seem to mention LLCs. These are “disregarded entities” at the IRS level, so what does that mean? For tax purposes they are treated as sole proprietorships? It seems to me there is some “m…

Business expenses must be ordinary and necessary to be deductible. A roofer would have a hard time justifying deducting a boat under the rule but a commercial fisherman wouldn’t have trouble.

Entertainment expenses are no longer deductible with recent tax law changes with few exceptions. It would be difficult today to get a CPA to sign-off off on a lot of what may have passed previously. A decent write-up can be found here - https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2023/nov/navigating-aro...

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#110

Post by AlbertCory »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #88
AlbertCory wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front. It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.

Hey, this is a great post. I have read similar complaints about Ooni pizza ovens, where it is very difficult to achieve the 900F temp and impossible in the front. Great point about 5 mins vs 1 min. Can you share: Do you think normie home cooks can taste the difference between a 5min and 1min pizza? I am unsure. For example, is the 5min pizza much drier? (I assume no.)

Thanks, you know, I think the brick oven pizza IS better. Yes, you probably could taste the difference. Whether the 5 min is dryer: maybe, could be.

My decision to sell my Ooni, after about 6 tries, was because my actual results were nowhere close to a pizzeria's, and way more trouble than my kitchen oven's.

Since you can't just open the door as you can with the kitchen oven, you have much less tolerance for error. In the kitchen, you just open after 5 minutes and decide, "OK, it's done" or "One more minute."

I guess I decided the brick oven pizzeria results are just not attainable at home. The kitchen results are damn good; way better than a frozen pizza.

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