Cool Mirror in Cape May
Sunday Serial: Cape May, NJ 2026 Edition
Back in December of 2023, my parents treated Rhonda and me to an overnight stay at the Virginia Hotel in Cape May, NJ, to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. We had such a great time that we’ve gone back several times since. Last year, we went down for an overnight on a big holiday weekend in early December (I think there was parade or something), and it was too crowded for our taste.
We have a tradition of going to Rehoboth Beach, DE, around this time of year with the kids, but since they’re in college and don’t have off, we decided to hit Cape May before the holiday season got too busy.
Our notion was to stop at a winery on the way down to the hotel, walk around downtown, and maybe grab a cocktail before checking in. I had scoped out Jessie Creek Winery, which is on the way to Cape Maybut just a bit north of it. We ended up at the Cape May Winery instead, which is a favorite of ours. Happily, they had their dry rosé available again. We split a bottle of that and had a flatbread, the latter of which was pretty good, but the crust is a bit drab compared to the what they’re serving at Sharrott Winery in Hammonton. It was topped with pepperoni and some pickled onions, and the obligatory honey drizzle.
We rolled up to nearby Hawk Haven Vineyards to have some more wine and pick up a bottle or two to take home. Management has decided that they aren’t serving bottles on premises anymore, which irritated me: you’ll serve me a glass of wine for $9 or more, but we can’t have a bottle? We took a couple of bottles to go instead: an Albariño and their signature series chardonnay.
We drove into town after the winery and wandered into the Brown Room at Congress Hall. It was a spacious room with lots of small tables, and a horseshoe-shaped bar. It was cocktail heaven: we had a couple of manhattans, which were superb. The bartender was a quiet, efficient fellow, with a white waistcoat and some serious mixology skills. Everything about the Brown Room was perfect: tasteful, elegant, giving off old-school vibes.
Our reservation at Peter Shields Inn for dinner was kinda late: 7:30. We checked in, stashed our bags, and then went down to sit on the patio with the Chardonnay from Hawk Haven. I asked about being seated earlier if something opened up, and that worked out well. We sipped the Chardonnay and munched on some Doritos I found in the coffee room on our room’s floor.
On Friday, after breakfast in the sun room at Peter Shields, we packed up and headed to a Marshall’s in Rio Grande, which has often been a haven of good finds. (I found a pair of pants, and a shoulder bag that unfortunately doesn’t fit my larger iPad, which was what I was looking for). The shoe section was disappointing, though; I’m on the hunt for a pair of brown driving loafers.
I was hoping to stop at Jessie Creek Winery on the way home to grab a bottle, but they didn’t open until noon. We did, however, decide to roll back into Cape May to grab a bottle or two of wine to take home, but we ended up waiting a few minutes until they opened and had some more of the dry rose and their white Field Blend, which is a blend of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Pinto Grigio. The age some of their wines in stone tanks, which was the case with the Field Blend. I loved that one.
Cape May November 2026
We’re fixing to head down to Cape May for an overnight visit. I made a reservation at Peter Shields Inn & Restaurant; dinner is a 7:30, and we’re staying in Room 9. We’ll hit a winery (Cape May Winery, Hawk Haven, or Jessie Creek) and then walk around downtown. I’ve got two cameras packed (E-M10 Mark IV and E-PL5) along with my Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO and Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7 Aspherical Lens (37mm filters) lenses. The restaurant has a liquor license now, so we don’t have to bring our own wine.
Sunday Serial: Bellview Winery’s Merlot, Breathink Outliner, and Bar Keeper’s Friend
I have been treated to a full week of of top-down driving weather, which shows no signs of abating. Rhonda and I went to a Halloween party last night with some old friends, and we had a great time. Sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy the weekend.
Bellview Winery’s Merlot
Much to the chagrin of Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways, Miles Raymond, Bellview Winery’s most recent wine on tap is a Merlot. It’s got a light, effervescent note on the tongue upon first sip, with a nice fruity finish. Got a growler for the week waiting in the pantry.
Breathink
Breathink is an outliner and research/writing tool for macOS. It’s a different bird in a number of ways from other outliners I’ve tried. It’s document-based, offers multiple views, and supports both notes. Breathink’s writing mode is a unique twist in the outliner space; you can select a node and pull the text into a separate editing pane, where you can more fully develop your thoughts. There’s no trial version, but for 10USD, I thought I’d give it a try.
Bar Keeper’s Friend
I upgraded my New York Times subscription recently; I had a super-cheap student subscription from the brief time I took classes and Kean University for a certification, and the Times finally wised up to the fact that I hadn’t been a student for a pretty long time (I finished the coursework/program just before the pandemic hit).
The price for my account went up to about 28 bucks a month, but I was able to get the family account, which includes the Wirecutter and Cooking sections, for four more dollars. So I took the plunge so dad and I could share on the up and up, and Rhonda could get the Cooking section.
I didn’t know that the Wirecutter was so focused on cleaning products, but in dutifully scanning the news in bed with my iPad mini each Saturday and Sunday morning, I saw an article about restoring your kitchenware with Bar Keeper’s Friend.
Oxalic Acid to the rescue! I ran a few errands this morning (whisky, gas for the Miata, and a prescription) and stopped by the local ShopRite to pick up a couple of things. While there, I grabbed a can of Bar Keeper’s Friend. As soon as I got home, I hit my beloved 10” Calphalon skillet with some of the stuff, and it’s like a new pan.
HoudahSpot: Spotlight’s Fastidious Cousin
Even find yourself frustrated with Spotlight and Finder search? HoudahSpot might be the answer.
Spotlight is a great tool for finding files on your Mac. It’s (generally) fast and uncomplicated. If you have some documents in your Documents folder and a bunch (ma)lingering on your desktop, Spotlight is probably the best way to find something. HoudahSpot, however, lets you drill deeper, specify (and restrict) search locations, and apply just about any criteria you can think of.
Spotlight offers a number of search modifiers that aren’t immediately obvious to the casual user.
- Filter by file type: You can type a forward slash followed by a file type, such as /PDF or /Images, to show only those specific document formats in your search results.
- Search by app or location: Enter an app name like Mail or Notes, or a location like iCloud Drive, and press the Tab key to search exclusively within that app or folder.
- Apply keywords and operators: Add kind:, author:, or title: before your search term, or use uppercase AND, OR, and NOT for precise results.
Learning these power moves notably improves your Spotlight experience. And of course, you can always move to Finder to finely tune your searches.
But if you’re doing that a lot, you might prefer HoudahSpot.
Search Templates
HoudahSpot offers a couple of different ways to repeat searches: templates and saved searches. They aren’t quite the same thing, but they’re close enough to each other that I had to think about the difference between the two while learning the app.
Search templates allow you to create a custom search that you can save and reuse. They appear in HoudahSpot’s sidebar, as well as in the search bar. You can use the template as your starting point and refine your search as needed without editing the template. Templates open a new, disposable search window. You can also create keyboard shortcuts to invoke templates. Once you have an open search window with a template applied, you can further refine your search.
HoudahSpot’s templates are saved in your user library, and so they don’t sync between machines. There are ways around this, though, as I’ll explain later.
Saved Searches
Unliked HoudahSpot’s templates, saved searches are documents that you can save anywhere on your Mac. As with templates, you can change the search criteria as you need to, and save the result as a new document or overwrite the original.
Spotlight-ish
I do happen to like the simplicity of Spotlight’s interface, most notably the command-space shortcut to open the search bar. HoudahSpot can’t replace that feature exactly, but you can set up a shortcut to open a search bar. HoudahSpot doesn’t start searching immediately, as Spotlight does, but it’s powerful in that you can specify which of your search templates to use, and restrict your search to file names or text contents.
Extensions and Integrations
You can integrate HoudahSpot with Finder; doing so creates a menu in any Finder’s menu bar. Invoking HoudahSpot from the Finder opens a new HoudahSpot search window focusing on the current Finder directory that you’re in. You can also select templates to apply to your search.
For example, I have a folder on my Desktop called “Collect”; it’s a dumping ground for files that have lingered too long on my desktop, which Hazel cleans up for me. I can open my Collect folder, invoke HoudahSpot and select a template, such as “Excel Files,” to reveal all of the spreadsheets in that folder.
There’s a HoudahSpot extension for Launchbar, too; you can enter text in Launchbar by pressing the apostrophe key, and then use the Launchbar extension to conduct a search. If you’re an Alfred user, there’s a HoudahSpot extension for that, too.
Lastly, there’s a PopClip extension for HoudahSpot. You select text and then click the HoudahSpot icon in the PopClip menu to search for that text on your Mac.
Examples
Here are some of the example searches and templates I’ve created in HoudahSpot:
- Markdown files: Any markdown file, regardless of its location, using any of the file extensions recognized as a Markdown file
- Outlines: Bike, OPML, OmniOutliner files
- Spreadsheets: any Excel (either extension) or Numbers files
Summing It Up
HoudahSpot isn’t a replacement for the default Spotlight interface, and in fact it’s built upon Spotlight’s deep integration with macOS. But it’s a powerful tool to help you find files that Spotlight won’t always reveal easily, and the customizable search templates are a power user’s dream. If you’ve ever taken a quick breath before hitting command-space to search using Spotlight, HoudahSpot is worth a look.
More reading:
Transformers: Even More Than Meets the Eye
John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers:
It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles.
I was all smiles and nods reading this. I too grew up with Transformers, and while we all liked them, they weren’t as fun as other toys with playing with friends. As Gruber pointed out, they were inferior as action figures to toys like GI Joe and other figures around the 3.75” range. And as vehicles, they didn’t look as cool as Matchboxes or Hot Wheels (or Stompers). And contrary to the spirit of cooperative play, transforming a Transformers could take a few seconds to a few minutes. (In fact, challenging conversions can be a selling point.) But you don’t want to sit around and watch your ten-year-old friends fumble from robot to truck and back again in the middle of a plot.
When we had kids, though, they both got into the Transformers of the day, starting with figures from around 2005 and up. One thing I immediately noticed with their Transformers were the degree of articulation in their robot modes. They were, generally speaking, robot humanoids that moved like action figures.
Pairing Beer and Cheese
Maggie Hoffman at Serious Eats on the best way to pair beer and cheese:
“If I were to say, ‘Fill in the blank: Cheese and ______’, most people would say ‘crackers’ right away. Well, beer is made from the same ingredients as crackers (plus a few extras), so to me it just makes sense to put them together,” says Jesse Vallins, Certified Cicerone and Executive Chef at The Saint Tavern in Toronto. But of course, when it comes to beer and cheese, some matches turn out tastier than others.__
My wife and I had dinner years ago with my parents at the excellent Vetri in Philadelphia, and the sommelier mentioned that he had struck up a friendship with a local brewer. He said that if we were interested in pairing beer with our courses, he would be happy to help. My dad and I took him up on the offer when dessert came around; we had a cheese plate and shared a few beers with each of the three cardinal flavor profiles he had assembled. It was a lot of fun and a great memory for me.
The One Rule Beer Experts Swear By When Pairing Beer and Cheese
Sunday Serial: iPhone Duo Apps, WriteRoom 4, nvALT, and the Avoiding the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune with a Portable Jump Starter
I say again: the summer is not actually the best time to drive a convertible. I’ve been treated to a full week of glorious 50+ degree weather, and I’ve been top down for most of it. I think 50 degrees is the bellwether; if it’s 50 or above, and it’s not raining, the top goes down.
It’s spritzes and cheese here at home as the chicken thighs roast in the oven. I’m lucky to be sitting here, feeling pretty blissed out, assembling a list of things that delight me, and sharing them with you.
iPhone Duo Apps
Stephen Robles created a curated site of applications that are ready for the iPhone Duo. If you, like me and Aaron, are on the long wait list for the new iPhone, you can prepare for delivery by checking out if your most trusted apps are ready for the new form factor.
WriteRoom 4 Releases
I had no idea that WriteRoom was going to reemerge, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it has. WriteRoom was one of the two Markdown-specific apps I started using when Markdown was getting a lot of traction in the nerd space. The other was Byword, which I generally preferred due to the fact that I could post to my Tumblr blog directly from the app (I think it also supported tables first, which I needed when deciding to use Markdown for my report writing at work). But as with TaskPaper, I always appreciated Jesse Grosjean’s attention to detail and style, so I always kept WriteRoom and updated it when the new versions came out.
And hey! WriteRoom 4 is in beta. You can get a steep discount on it during the beta, too, which is exactly what I did. Some observations:
- Typewriter noises: WriteRoom sounds like a clicky mechanical keyboard when you type. You can turn it off, too. I found myself browsing keyboards at Best Buy this afternoon after typing on WriteRoom for a spell.
- Themes: You can set different themes in WriteRoom, depending upon your preferences. The default is a DEC terminal monitor, with screen bend and everything.
- Heading overview mode
- Number Headings: I’m not familiar with this feature from other Markdown apps I’ve used, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there. In WriteRoom, headings and their children can be numbered automatically, so rather than having “##” as a an H2 heading in our document, you can see “1.2” or whatever level it would be. It looks great and it’s useful.
There’s more I could say about WriteRoom, but Sunday Serial isn’t the place for a big review. I hope you take a look at it if you’re a Mac user who writes in Markdown, however often that might be.
nvALT Resurrected
Speaking of writing in Markdown, Brett Terpstra has updated his fork of Notational Velocity and made it available for download again. This is to tide Markdown purists until the relaunch of nvUltra, which has been in the works for some time now.
WriteRoom, Lettera, and MarkEdit are three document-based Markdown apps that I’ve used over the years; there are more, including BBEdit and TextMate. Ulysses, which is how I write most of my posts for this site, is a database-based Markdown app.
You can use nvALT to search, create, and edit Markdown documents; you point it at one folder on your Mac, and nvALT lists them in a single window. It’s a great way to employ Markdown files instead of a notes app. Your files are portable, and you can send them to other apps as you see fit. I was a big user of Notational Velocity, and later nvALT, for all of my note taking for years.
Portable Jump Starters
I stopped by our local ShopRite this morning for a couple of things, and there was a woman stranded in the parking lot with a dead car battery. I gave her a quick jump from my car and went on with my day, but it got me thinking about our family’s challenges with car batteries, and the simple solution of a portable jump starter.
It’s an inevitable part of owning a car, having a dead battery. It might happen after a chilly night, when you head out for work after the first frost of the season. It might happen completely out of the blue. I’ve had to drive home suddenly to jump Rhonda’s car, when she got stuck at the vet’s office, and I’ve had to ask for a jump from a coworker in the parking lot at work, apropos of no previous issues with my car.
Once, all four of us were in the waiting line to get onto the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and when I tried to start the car to board, the battery was dead. I had charged it the night before we left using a trickle charger, but there we were: stuck, and embarrassed. A patient ferry employee came to our rescue with a portable jump starter, and I resolved to get one for myself.
I ordered one on the ferry ride to Delaware, and we picked it up at an AutoZone or Advance Auto Parts on our way to the hotel. We kept it in the trunk of our 2016 Subaru WRX for the rest of its life, as the car was plagued with some battery issues, the cause of which we never figured out. It has come in handy many, many times. In fact, we’ve gotten by without replacing the battery in our Husqvarna riding lawn mower for the past couple of years, relying on the jump starter to get it running. (I can be weirdly cheap about some things.)
I don’t mind relying on the kindness of strangers if I have to, but it’s my preference to be able to help myself.
Every single time.
The Party is Always in the Kitchen
Nicholas Magand on the unshakable attraction of the kitchen as the social hub of a party:
To summarise, the living room was the familiar place to sit and chat with people you already knew: it was a great way to spend time with friends. The kitchen was the crowded space to talk and meet new, weird, interesting people: it was the social network lubricant. Both rooms managed to coexist, and in many ways were codependent.
Our house has been in my wife’s family for its entire existence, and was, for a couple of generations, the hub of family gatherings. She said when she was a a kid, everyone gathered in the kitchen. That pattern persisted into our ownership of the house. We even tried a couple of times to encourage people to sit in the living room, because it’s huge and cooking was difficult with everyone gathered in the kitchen.
We could never get it to stick.
Traverse: OPML Outliner for the Mac (and iOS)
Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.
The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.
OmniOutliner is the GOAT of macOS outliners, and it remains one of the best apps I use, full stop. I love Bike, too, and use it all the time. And I’ve tried (but not purchased) Kosshi. Zavala, of course, is another great (and free) option across the Apple ecosystem. Long ago, there was Folding Text… which is back! Another great outliner is MindNode, which reveals the structural similarity between mind maps and outlines.
Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that show parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.
Traverseis another player in the outliner space from Outliner Software, and I’m well impressed. Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.
There’s a lot going on in Traverse’s inspector pane; you can convert nodes to to-dos, mark the node with a color, or add a note (one of my favorite OmniOutliner features).
Traverse offers three distinct views: Outline, Writer, and Column views. Outline view shows each line as a visually distinct node, with a round-rect drawn around the node. Writer view is a simpler mode, with reveal arrows to expand and collapse nodes. Column view is the most interesting, with nodes spilling left to right across the screen. While the first two modes are standard fare for an outliner, column view is a neat twist on the presentation of an outline.
There’s an iOS version of Traverse is there, but the app is a limited or companion version of the Mac’s (it’s also free). You can open and edit OPML files in iCloud, but it uses a folder on iCloud, where the Mac version’s defaults to a location in your home library (you can change the location on the Mac if you want to share Traverse’s Library. On iPadOS, Traverse’s Column view isn’t available on the iPad. I’d say that’s the central feature of this app, and hence a notable omission.
Where OmniOutliner, Bike, and Folding Text are document-based apps, Kosshi, MindNode, and Zavala are database-based apps. Traverse looks and acts like a database app despite using OPML files, which you can reveal in the Finder by right-clicking on the document’s title in the app’s library pane. This allows you to round-trip between other applications, sure; Traverse will prompt you to import external files to the app’s library, though.
An outline can be a project map, a writing structure, a research database, a decision tree, a study plan, a product roadmap, or a way to take apart an idea until you can see what it is made of.
Traverse leans into that. It is not trying to be a full task manager, a notes archive, a mind-mapping canvas, or a document editor. It is focused on helping you build, browse, reshape and export structured information.
I took a PDF of a chapter of New Jersey’s Administrative Code that I reference a lot for work, and used Microsoft’s Copilot to create an OPML file that contains the full text of the chapter. I pulled that into Traverse to get a sense for how it would handle a large document with many nodes. The color coding for levels is a nice touch.
Traverse uses Apple Intelligence on your local machine, but you can also add other models to employ agent skills.
NetNewsWire Themes
Holy Crap… I j
ust discovered these NetNewsWire Themes. Lots of fun and tasteful choices.
The French Fold
I’ve watched a pile of YouTube videos in search of omelette mastery. I’ve only ever had diner-style omelettes at restaurants, and while I liked them plenty, it turned out that there was a world of omelette-making techniques to explore. The version I love the most bears little resemblance to the diner-style omelette, but that doesn’t dampen my appreciation for the diner-style omelette when I eat at a diner.
Rhonda and I met up with Aaron last weekend, and we got to talking about omelette-making. It occurred to me that since buying the Blackstone, I haven’t made many omelettes indoors. And quite frankly, while the Blackstone makes a fine omelette, they don’t compare to the ones I developed a proficiency for using our stainless steel skillet.
The skillet is a challenge because it is not non-stick, at least not in the technical sense of the word. You can absolutely make an omelette in a stainless steel skillet, but you have to hew to a couple of rules:
- Temperature: slowly heat the pan to at least 175°F. An infrared thermometer is an indispensable tool here.
- Butter: use about 15 grams of butter for a three-egg omelette.
That’s mostly it. You should watch some videos if you’re not ready to break some eggs, but otherwise, just give it a shot. It’s a dish worth perfecting, however aspirational perfection may be in the fiddly world of protein, but entirely edible no matter how it comes out. In the worst case, you have a nice meal; in the best case, you’ve perfected a fussy culinary technique.
Sunday Serial: Traverse Outliner for macOS, Sarti Spritz, and Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs
CARROT Weatheris predicting some cool temps for the week ahead. I’m ready for it! It’s been kinda hot lately. I have learned that 50 degrees Fahrenheit is just fine for top-down driving.
Today’s installment of Sunday Serial features 33% software, and 66% epicure. Enjoy!
Traverse Outliner
Mac nerds love two things: RSS readers and outliners. (Not exclusively. Just extensively.) I spent well over a year using Windows 11, and a lot of that time searching for native RSS readers and outliners for the OS.
The Mac is an embarrassment of riches in these two categories.
Outliners are classically a top-to-bottom affair, with parents and children that you can focus on or hoist to narrow your view. Traverse takes a different approach, offering one view (of several) that shows parents to children left to right, or horizontally. Think of Column view in macOS. This is a great use of space on widescreen displays, which is pretty much all of them these days.
Traverse uses OPML files. You can export to Markdown as a list or file, CSV, or even stream to Marked. It supports links to nodes within an outline, but Hookmark works in the app, too.
Sarti Spritz
Rhonda and I love an Aperol Spritz any time of year, a fact about which I’ve spilled a fair amount of digital ink. There’s a great riff on the classic that swaps out the Aperol for Sarti. Sarti is a bit more fruity and less herbal than Aperol, but the blood orange flavor is great and keeps the drink from being too sweet. Looking forward to having these in the summer.
This particular mix is made with Autumn Lake’s excellent (if price) Boujee Pet Nat, a sparkling wine that’s perfectly dry and loosely effervescent.
Coco Larkin’s Soft-Boiled Eggs
Rhonda turned me on to Coco Larkin’s quick and easy recipe for soft-boiled eggs. You mash them up in a cup or bowl with a nub of butter. Enjoy with toast if you like, but I can see myself having these at the office san carbs.
Houdashspot
I’ve been perennially curious about HoudahSpot, despite how good I’ve found Spotlight to be over the years. The Siri+Spotlight combo has rankled me since it came out; so much of Liquid Glass has made interface elements bigger than I’d like, and Spotlight is no exception. Looking forward to writing up a more fulsome review, but for now, I’ve enjoyed creating some saved searches in HoudahSpot.
Sunday Serial: New Brunswick Edition
Rhonda and I drove up to New Brunswick yesterday to visit Aaron. The plan was to stop at Stokelan Estates Winery on the ride up, then Dinner with Aaron,, after which we’d retire to a nearby Marriot. Sunday would be some shopping with Aaron before heading back home. I am taking a vacation day tomorrow to take the Sunday Scaries out of robbing some joy from the occasion.
Our attempt at sharing a bottle and a flatbread at Stokelan was foiled by other people with the same idea. We stopped there, but they had no seats. We tried nearby Iron Plow/Tramonti, but they were closed for a private event. We figured we’d just high-tail it to New Brunswick, scoop up Aaron, and check in at the hotel.
We had stopped at Bagliani’s for salami and Gran Padano cheese, so we thought that we could grab a bottle of wine to take back to the hotel with us. We drove straight past Aaron’s house to a corner liquor store called Peters. The joint was full of students, and lots of them coming and going. Aaron was calling me on the phone while I was shopping; he saw us roll by in search of Peters.
Casa Ragazzi
Casa Ragazzi is a trendy Italian restaurant in downtown New Brunswick. I was excited to try it after I saw the menu, which appeared to offer the formal Italian dinner sequence: apps, followed by a small pasta course, and then a secondo, or meat course. We ordered this way and the waiter was surprised. That set off alarm bells; the arrival of both courses at once confirmed our suspicions. Our cocktails were great, though, and the food, while arriving at too-quick-of-a-pace, was delicious. Aaron and I split a T-bone florentine, and I finally had a chance to try guanciale.
Ruby Ke Kitchen Se
This week on Designed in California, Jason Snell interviewed Ron Johnson, the guy who created Apple’s retail stores. Johnson recently released a book about his career, including his long tenure at Apple. One thing that struck me is how Johnson talked about brick and mortar retail: he loves it. He talks about the opportunity to see things, to interact with aspirational purchases. He even posits a kind of communal effect of mall-shopping.
I don’t know about all of that, but as a kid of the 80s, I’ll always have fond mall memories. Sprinting between the anchor stores and stopping by KB to check out action figures, later shopping for acid-wash jeans, and countless slices of pizza. In that spirit, we often find outselves at the Menlo Park Mall when we visit Aaron.
It’s a nice mall, much nicer than our local malls, and they have an Apple Store. So we popped in to check out the 18 Pro, from the new colors (that burgundy is really dark!) to the aperture controls on the camera.
Between all of the walking and the 30-minute Peloton ride this morning, I was starving. We all agree to Indian for a late lunch/early dinner, and Yelp helpfully pointed us to Ruby Ke Kitchen Se, a quaint spot in nearby Edison. We had no recommendation save for Yelp’s, so we dodged the rain and ran inside.
Ruby Se Ktichen Se proved to be a revelation. We ordered a couple of chaat appetizers, including an Indochinese version of fried paneer. The sauce invoked both Thai and Chinese likenesses, and we were all well impressed.
The gentleman who served us (I’m guessing he’s the owner) shared a number of enlightening details. He talked about the Chinese cultural influences in the cuisine due to Chinese immigrants in India. Similarly, when we remarked about the difference in color between Aaron’s goat Korma and Rhonda’s chicken korma–Aaron’s was a darker, richer color, while Rhonda’s had more of a red, tomatoey aspect–he offered that making the same sauce and just swapping out the protein isn’t true to the cuisine, and hence the differences.