Doug's Blog

On paper The Lyndale Tap House looks like it would be my kind of place: a dark but welcoming neighborhood gathering spot with an ample selection of tap beers and a dedication to better-than-your-average-pub food. The Lyndale was on my list of places to visit anyway, but with Emily and Conner coming to its defense recently after a half-star review by The Heavy Table, stopping in became a higher priority.

The first thing you’ll notice if seated at one of the many high-top tables is the lack of places to hang your coat; there are no coat hooks and most of the stools don’t have backs. Come on, this is Minnesota, and it’s getting cold outside.

I was ready to forgive this oversight when the sound system pumped out two Bowie songs in a row (“Fame” and “Suffragette City”), but the music quality went south after that. It was looking like The Lyndale would have to be judged on its food alone.

The legs and thighs came covered in an habanero barbecue sauce. The sauce was tasty enough, but I was woefully underwhelmed by how spicy it was; if you’re going to make a big deal about your habaneros, I expect them to light my mouth on fire.

Next up was the pit beef, which Emily said she thinks about “all the time.” This is a apparently a Baltimore classic, and just one of the “pit” items on The Lyndale’s menu.

Probably the nicest thing I can say about the pit beef is that it was tasteless, which is to say it didn’t actively offend my taste buds, but instead, eating it was akin to biting into a flavorless stack of protein set lovelessly between two halves of a soggy kaiser roll. Emily described the beef as “amazingly tender”; my experience was quiet the opposite, with medium-rare beef that was far too chewy. Even the onions and horseradish sauce didn’t give the pit beef much of a kick.

The fries, too, were soggy and unimpressive. If this is what passes for regional comfort food in the Charm City, then the dystopia of “The Wire” suddenly makes sense to me.

I have to agree with The Heavy Table on this one, but I’d be ready to give The Lyndale a second chance in a month or two if they’re still open. In the meantime, if I’m hankering for really delicious roast beef, Whitey’s is still my spot.

How long does it take to get the wrinkles out of a new restaurant?

No, it’s not a rhetorical question, could someone tell me? And for that matter clue in the folks at The Butcher Block. The Northeast Italian eatery meets gastropub has been open almost five months now, and sitting at the bar listening to chef Filippo Caffari last week it was clear the place hasn’t quite reached the same sweet spot that the tender-as-a-peach short ribs have. Chef Caffari, who presumably doesn’t manage the front of house, mused to the bartender about the inexperienced waitresses — maybe not the wisest thing to say with a patron sitting next to him.

In any case, if the chef wants to send the waitresses to boot camp, it won’t be the only noticeable change The Butcher Block has seen.

First up, the wings. The original palette of 29 flavors has been pared back to 14. Apparently all the ingredients needed to make 29 sauces from scratch was just taking up too much darned room in the small kitchen. This is a shame since the whole reason I stopped in last week was to continue on my quest to try all the wing flavors (from which I had taken something of a hiatus).

You can also forget about stopping into The Butcher Block to satisfy your late, late night appetite. It was originally open till 4 a.m. on Friday and Saturday but will now be closing up at 2 — still plenty late, but it will be Taco Bell for you if you’re still hungry after that.

If you’re stopping in for a seat at the bar, you’ll now be a little more comfortable. The bar, which had been about four or five inches too tall has been chopped down to the right height.

And gone is bartender Ben, who had made sitting at the too-tall bar worth it with his stories and obvious passion for food and drink. I know Ben had been looking to do some serving in addition to bar duties, which may be a symptom of an unfortunate layout at The Butcher Block, that leaves the bartender acting as a host all night and probably lacking in tips.

This marks the end of my Butcher Block wing reviews; I didn’t review every flavor I tried and with them paring back the number of flavors it doesn’t seem worth the effort anymore.

Hopefully The Butcher Block can get its kinks worked out; I really want to see my neighborhood succeed as a food destination.

Kristy and Katie Barry have applied for 150 jobs since graduating Rutgers University 17 months ago. It’s a familiar story for recent graduates, though I wonder how much the fact that they both have journalism degrees has added to the long wait for a job.

Good kids who went to good schools, the brassy, effervescent Barry twins, 24, always envisioned their young adulthood in New York City as a lush time of stimulating work, picturesque travel and a rich social orbit. But they graduated into a downbeat nightmare of a job market. According to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates under 27 so far this year averaged 7.1 percent, nearly double what it was in 2007 and the highest yearly average in the 30 years this data point has been tracked.

And so Kristy and Katie and most of their friends are forever hunting for jobs, both mundane interim work to sustain them and long-term positions that could mean a career. Many days, it is as if they are stalking something on the endangered species list.

William Safire died today from pancreatic cancer. He may have worked for a crook (I refer here to Richard Nixon, not The New York Times), but anyone who cares about politics and/or language will surely miss his wit and… wisdom. That cliché seems fitting for his obituary.

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

I didn’t go. I don’t like crowds, and I don’t like paying admission to eat junk food. I can eat junk food anywhere. Just today I had a bag of chips. And a couple beers. Delicious.

This isn’t a video and it isn’t funny. Only click if you want to read a cogent explanation of how Twitter works in theory and why it’s not banal.

Not everyone we can see will hear us, as they don’t necessarily follow us, and they may not dip into the stream in time to catch the evanescent ripples in the flow that our remark started. However, as our view is fo [sic] those we choose to follow, our emotional response is set by that, and we behave more civilly in return.

For those with Habermas’s assumption of a single common public sphere this makes no sense – surely everyone should see everything that anyone says as part of the discussion? In fact this has never made sense.