I know I’ve promised a few things that haven’t come to pass, like an account of my Chicago trip, a place for you to post your food/trip pics, and an update of Eat Every Bite. In the middle of rescuing a dog–and god bless the folks who do it everyday, because that is hard–one of my dogs tore not one, but BOTH of her rear ACLs and it’s been a little crazy around this place. She’s home and recovering now (and the other animals are driving us crazy because we’re having to keep her isolated). Good lord willing and if the creek don’t rise, I’ll get everything done tomorrow. I’m going to be working from home so, in theory, I should be able to catch up. Bear with me, and the wine tasting for tomorrow is on as scheduled.

Fredric Koeppel’s blog Bigger than Your Head has been nominated for the Best Wine Review Blog in this year’s American Wine Blog Awards. Everyone go cast your vote! Click this link http://www.fermentation.typepad.com/ and you can go right to the page.

Hello, everyone. This is your friendly Blogmaster. We’re about to do a little overhaul work on Whining & Dining. Giving it a nicer look. Hopefully, no issues will come up, but if something looks a little strange, it should be worked out pretty soon.

If you’re reading this around 7 p.m. or so tonight and there is still something wrong, please e-mail me or post a comment on here describing the problem.

Any other feedback is welcome as well. If you don’t want to e-mail me directly, just let Jennifer or Fredric know and they’ll pass the word along.

Thanks,
Bryan Robinson
Online Content Producer

 The Girl Scouts are out selling thie cookies everywhere today. When I went to Schnucks (nice-looking king crab legs for $7.99 per pound) an adorable little girl wearing a “Brownies are Good for Everything” (or something like that) T-shirt sked me if I wanted to buy cookies and I told her no. Remember, I’m doing the no-flour no-sugar diet, plus I’ve already purchased cookies for the office.

When I was leaving another woman told her that she couldn’t buy cookies because she was on a diet. The same little girl asked me again if I wanted cookies and I said no thanks. As soon as I walked away, I heard her say to her friend: “I know what we should do! Let’s only ask the skinny ones!”

I laughed so hard I was tempted to turn around and buy cookies from her.

I’ll be out for the rest of the week, tending to my daughter who is having surgery for a torn ACL. But Fredric is back, and I’ll be here at 7 p.m. Thursday for our second wine tasting. Be sure to go get a bottle of 2004 Tres Barcos and meet me back here then…

Hi, readers, I’m going to be off from about 19 minutes from now until Monday, January 7. YES!!!
LL and I will have a quiet holiday. I cook a traditional “English” dinner for us on Christmas Eve — standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, Brussel sprouts with a Bordeaux red wine with cheese and port to follow — and a little Southern breakfast on Christmas morning, you know, eggs and country ham and red-eye gravy, grits and biscuits, with a bottle of Pol Roger Brut champagne. So much for our traditions. Otherwise, I’m planning on getting a lot of my own writing done, as well as posting to my personal website and blog, and taking lots of walks with the dogs.

It’s been great posting to “Whining & Dining” this year and enlightening, educational, amusing, exasperating and above all fun reading all of your heartfelt responses to my and Jennifer’s ideas and opinions. While I’m off, I’ll keep up with what’s going on on this blog and when it’s appropriate, I’ll send in a response.

Aside from that, I hope everybody has a wonderful, well, whatever you want to call it — Christmas, holiday season, Yuletide and so on. Eat well, drink well (but moderately) and keep it honest.

Sorry for my absence, although it seems plenty of spirited discussion has gone on without me. Last week I spent a couple of days in video training, then a close friend died and I was preoccupied.

Let’s talk about the video training. I hope this will start next month, but don’t hold me to that: I’ve got a lot to learn! Anyway, here’ s the plan. Every Friday I’m going to post a video of an inexpensive restaurant, something that’ll run about a minute and show the food and feature a brief interview with the chef or proprietor. It’s going to be called “Cheap Food Friday” and will also include a brief written review.

So, start telling me where you’d like me to go, and I’ll keep working on my very rudimentary camera skills.

I’m a mother and I love kids. I really do. And I’m good with kids–I’ve only known a few who weren’t taken with me like I was with them. I say this because I know this topic is likely to be a touchy one and I want you to know from the get-go that I’m not against kids.

But there’s a time for children and a time for adults. I’ve never understood people who take their children with them everywhere. (I’ve had people bring them to parties without asking, and on occasion people have even brought their animals to my house without asking, so I suppose a credible argument could be made that I know some rude folks). I realize it’s not always easy to get a babysitter, and I’m shocked when people tell me what they pay for a babysitter these days, but here’s the bottom line: If your kids are going to be in restaurants, you need to be sure they behave. They need to use inside voices, they need to stay in their seats, they don’t need to stand over the back of the booth and talk to other diners (yes, I know this is cute sometimes, but it should stop after a minute or two). But I’m sure we all agree on those basics, and I’m certain that most people here also agree that of course children have to go to restaurants because after all, if they don’t dine out, how will they learn to appreciate the experience? And we want that for everyone.

Here’s where it gets weird for me. When children are around, I feel that adults should behave in a certain way. I’m obviously not talking about using foul language or otherwise behaving boorishly. I don’t think that you necessarily want your children listening to people talking about politics or religion, as my friends and I often do, spiritedly sometimes, when we dine. I’m dead certain you don’t want them to hear me gossiping with my girlfriends–we tell it like it is when we get going. You might also not want them to overhear personal family conversations, about my grandfather in a nursing home, about how age has been cruel to him. Or to see me moved to tears talking to a friend about the dog I’d recently lost. Tears, I said, not blubbering.

I bring up these specific topics because these are ones I’ve been aware of having when I’ve become aware that children are listening. I try to be careful and will modify conversation if I feel it’s necessary, but really, it’s up to you, not me, to monitor what your children hear, just like you monitor what they watch on television. But I don’t want to feel inhibited from having comfortable dialogue with my friends or family. 

That said, when it comes right down to it, I’ll side with a mother in a restaurant–as long as she’s trying to control her kids–before I will someone who confronts her. One of the rudest encounters I’ve witnessed was at a Japanese restaurant last year. A family with several young children occupied the largest table in the place and while the kids were making noticeable noise, they weren’t being rude and it was a restaurant perfectly suitable for young children. While her husband was paying, the mother was trying to soothe a fussy baby–not a screaming baby, just a fussy one–and get the other kids ready to leave.

Two women at a nearby table were intolerable. They started off by loudly complaining about how she couldn’t control her children, then they tried to stare her down, then–and oh! they were waiting for this–when she apologized and said they were leaving as soon as they paid, they tore into her. She didn’t take the bait, but that didn’t stop them from saying over and over how rude she was, asking questions like “Don’t you see how rude you are?”After they left, these women STILL didn’t shut up. They complained about the mother (but not the father; hmmm), then about management. I doubt they were, but they should be truly embarrassed and I’ve written about this before, hoping that these women see it and recognize how foolish and boorish they looked.

I know I’ve mentioned that our blog has been updated recently. Unfortunately for me, I’m not quite so with it. I forgot to bookmark my new sign-in page on my laptop and couldn’t post from the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford. Yes, I could’ve called the office, could’ve called Fredric, could have at the very least posted an excuse–but I’m lame.

Worse, you’re going to have to wait until tomorrow to hear the highlights, because I’ve spent half the day writing about it and I’m talked out for now. But I did get to eat lunch with Shirley Corriher on Friday, and she is absoutely the doll she seems to be on TV. There’s so much to tell you about, and I promise that as soon as I finish the Food section tomorrow, I’ll post pictures and give you a preview of what’s coming out on Wednesday. Now I’m going to go get that thread about kids in restaurants going…

I wrote on my personal blog a few weeks ago about the decline in relevance of the venerable Gourmet magazine and the alarming blurring of the line between the magazine’s editorial copy and advertising, and I had two interesting responses from Jeff, who brought up, as an aside, this “Whining & Dining” blog. Here are excerpts from his second post:

There are many blogs out there devoted to food and what we would like Gourmet or Bon Appetit to really be like – basically not selling a lifestyle … but all about the food!
Blogs like W&D are fairly similar to NY Times, SF Chronicle, etc, and are very useful for the local buzz on the restaurant scene, farmer’s market finds, the local grocery now carries great new ingredients, etc, but aren’t necessarily like some food blogs that are strictly related to the food, cooking, recipes, ingredient sourcing, etc.

I think what Jeff is distinguishing between here are blogs that are primarily newsy and blogs that are primarily about the process of cooking particular dishes, recipes and so on.

Which kind of blog is “Whining & Dining,” and what would you readers of “Whining & Dining” like it to be? Or is “W&D” a combination of both types of blog? And is that O.K.? Jennifer and I seem to be pretty comfortable with the way we’re doing things now, but we like to hear from our readers, too.

Look at the posts that have gotten the most responses (over 20) since May:
5/24: Why Do Restaurants Close? 30 responses.
7/11: It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Burger. 31 responses.
7/19: Smoking. 22. (That is, smoking in restaurants and bars.)
7/23: First Bite: Circa. 29.
7/25: Ciao, Bella (for now, anyway). 23.
6/27: Our favorite ethnic restaurants. 21.
6/27: Can I get a steak right? 47.
6/11: Strip mall and stars. 27.
8/17: Once more, to the stars. 52. (More on the CA restaurant rating system.)
8/21: Chain restaurants. 48.
8/23: Food we lie about. 38.
8/24: This morning’s review of Circa. 58.
8/29: Sigh: Those Yankees. 33. (About reviews of Justin Timberlake’s restaurant in New York.)
9/4: Restaurants We Miss. 67.
9/20: I call it tasting, he calls it theft. 24. (Sampling grapes in the grocery store.)
9/25: Now this makes me mad. 46. (About being charged for condiments in restaurants.)
10/2: Harrah’s puts money on Paula. 36. (Wow, do a lot of people ever hate Paula Deen!)

You will notice immediately that most of these popular posts were about dining in restaurants, service in restaurants, nostalgia for restaurants and thinking about, talking about and criticising restaurants.

While people clearly enjoy the other topics that Jennifer and I touch on — food finds, shopping for food, southern cooking and so on — I think that this list tells us what readers look for on the W&D blog.