Chicago! Yeah, Lake View.

I'm at a work training session in Chicago and the office got me a sick rate at the Four Seasons. I don't know what kind of corporate hoo-haw is going on here, but I can tell you that I'm paying less per night to stay in the Four Seasons than I was to stay a night at the Comfort Inn in New Bern, North Carolina. Go figure.

Tonight we had dinner at Gibson's, where I narrowly avoided going into diabetic shock after eating a pound of blue cheese dressing (on a salad), followed by a twice-baked franken-potato and a side of grilled cow. Then we had a gallon of ice cream. for dessert. On the walk home my heart was racing in an attempt to both burn off some of the 5,000 calories I must have consumed whilst pumping the cholesterol laden blood through my choked arteries. The temperature had fallen into the low 40s, but I couldn't tell since my body had become a heat-laden engine in its attempt to shed the caloric intake. Don't get me wrong; I loved every second of it. Croaking from a heart attack in front of my corporate colleagues would be a pathetic way to go, and I'm guessing it wouldn't even make a sidebar in AdWeek.

That's the John Hancock Center taking up the view in the right side of the window. Not sure what that building directly across the street is.

Go! Go! Raleigh

My friend Dana is again publishing an amazing blog at gogoraleigh.com. He was out of the scene for a while, but is back this year with what I think should be recognized as one of the best, most comprehensive civic blogs I've ever read. Would someone give this guy a Webby?

Everything from the highest level city development plans, to sports (he's an admitted Carolina and general ACC basketball addict) to where the next chain restaurant is opening down to local music events, if there is anything you want to know about what's happening in Raleigh, it's here. Speaking of Raleigh, and the fantastic time we spent there with Caro's friends and our families, if you want to see change happen fast, look at that place. If you think they're only building high-rise luxury towers with downtown loft living in places like Manhattan, Atlanta and Los Angeles, well then think again. With an air of objectivity, the site feeds you some insight into the impact that development is having on economy, civic pride and local activism. Growth (and the sprawl that goes with it) isn't all it's cracked up to be, and this site will give you some perspective to follow the impact of development on a mid-sized city. My aunt, who also lives in Raleigh, tells me developer greed is taking over there at the expense of sustainable and environmentally sound growth. It's in these mid-size cities where you can really see how fast change and growth can happen. Interesting stuff.

"Rocken" the Three Sandwich Sampler

3 Squares Bakery on Abbot Kinney:

Shrimp Grilled Cheese with Diakon/Wasabi Pickle
German Meat Loaf on Pretzel Bread with Pickled Veggies
Lox with Horseradish Mayo and veggie chips.

Also had an awesome burger, and there is a modern Viennese style bakery with excellent Julius Meinl coffee.

Wow, It's ColecoVision

I found this while checking out Ning again - where you can create your own social network app from templates created by others. I've been filling out some content and exploring some of the features and tools on Ning for a LA restaurant review app that will serve as a companion to my blog. I got a great url for it: boltoflight.ning.com. My tagline (cheesy) is Where Good Food Strikes. I'll work on that, I promise. Once I get some content uploaded to it, I'll add a permanent link onto the site. Now that I'm a Wii and a Xbox 360 owner, it's funny to see how far the industry has come since its inception.

My father bought be the original PONG game back when we had a black and white Sony television, which if I'm not mistaken was multi-band because we originally bought it in Germany, but there was a switch on it so it would work in the US. I could be making that up, but that's my recollection - that and when you turned it off the electron beam made a really cool pattern on the screen and then dissolved into a bright dot. I never had an Atari, but I did have one of the early Texas Instruments personal computers, which had a terrible button keyboard. I used to spend hours typing in BASIC programs from BYTE magazine, which you can now buy on eBay.

Carolina BBQ Plate

Heaven on a plate: pulled pork with pepper vinegar sauce, cole slaw, hushpuppies, fried okra, and a jug full of sweet tea. Allen & Son Bar-B-Q in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. If you ever find yourself in Raleigh-Durham, do not skimp on a trip out to get a taste of what might be the most original and most American of meals.

Allen & Son Bar-B-Q

While back home I had to make a pilgrimage to one of the great Bar-B-Q restaurants in the country. True Eastern North Carolina pork barbecue, hickory smoked and filled with a flavor that you just know doesn't get any more authentic. It's food that is timeless and unchanging. It's hard to describe, and most people probably don't usually think about food so nostalgically, but it's like food for the centuries. There seem to be so few American foods that taste so purely good as this kind of real barbecue: meaty, gamey, earthy, tangy, peppery, spicy and sweet.

Allen & Son was featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the week before we headed back home. I couldn't find it on their site, although there is this photo of Keith Allen. The article was a good background on why Allen & Son is the real deal.

My Barfy Valentine.

The least of anyone's concerns in buying one's wife a nice Valentine's Day card is whether you should consider having it come from a household pet that shits in a box.

Should this hideous example of feline fancy consumerism completely turn you off of Valentine's, no fear, for just a few rows away was the card section titled, "Anti-Valentine's Day." Alas, all cards in that category were sold out. This was spied at the Kerr Drugs in the North Hills shopping center in Raleigh.

Kitty cats were just the beginning of the Valentine's Day fun. We had booked a table at one of the nicest restaurants in Raleigh, Second Empire. The food was good (although it's one of those places that feels compelled to overstate the quality of the menu by listing too many ingredients for each dish; less would truly have been more) and the decor nice. For some reason they thought it made sense to introduce us to our waiter as if she were a nurse who would be changing our bedpans - "Jessica will be your server tonight and she'll be seeing to your needs," or something like that - but the kicker came mid-meal. That's when a young guy at an adjacent table decided to hurl all over the floor between his chair and the wall. I think he probably would have not even excused himself had I not waited a minute, and then decided to go grab a manager to take care of the situation. Our waiter, Jessica, was kind enough to apologize and tell us that she couldn't tell that he'd been drinking before he arrived, but hey, it really wasn't all about her, now was it? They kindly re-sat another table who had a more unfortunate view of the guy's partially digested meal on the floor, but we never received any sort of interaction from the management. I don't expect free food for the trouble, but I was surprised, frankly, that we didn't receive a complimentary dessert, or even a simple apology. In any case, the meal was pretty good, although expensive even by LA standards. We had a great wine, and one of the best vodka gimlets I've ever had. In the end, Mr. Puker made for a good story, so Caro and I will always have that funny memory of Valentine's Day, and Raleigh.

It Doesn't Get Much Bloodier Than This.

While in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, I had a spare hour while Caroline took Henry out for a stroll. We were meeting up at our friends' parents home in Pacific Heights, so along the way there Diana suggested I might stop into Balboa Cafe. I was able to catch part of a football game, had a famous "bar burger" and sucked down a couple of these amazing bloody marys. One of the best ones I've ever had.