Some observations from readers and Buzz…feel free to comment.
If you experience issues with your meal or service, please don’t wait til you leave or, as happened at Farm House Cafe, write an anonymous two page scorching letter about the scallop dish they ate. Had Olivier Bioteau, the chef/owner been aware at the time of the meal, he could have replaced the errant dish and could have dealt with the diner at the moment. By not expressing (nicely, by the way) the problem when it happens, everyone loses. And, restaurants and their owners always like to hear good comments also. (Side note: Farm House Cafe will be closed Labor Day weekend from Sunday dinner to reopen for dinner on Wednesday, September 8).
Shishito peppers seem to be the current darling of local chefs. The summer pepper is small and thin-skinned, not really hot and usually served in Japanese restaurants as an appetizer (peppers flash fried in a tiny bit of oil and cooked to just barely scorch the skin, then served with sea salt or topped with bonito flakes). Buzz ate them at Searsucker (called so over cleverly “no shoshiito schoos”) and heard from a reader about them at Bali Hai.
Trader Joe’s now carries coconut water, a good mix of electrolytes, with no additives that Buzz can attest, tastes good. It comes from the water of green coconuts and is considered to be quite a healthy drink. If you’d like to buy fresh green coconuts and coconut trees, check out Florida Coconuts, a company that grows and ships the coconuts nationwide.
The New York Times Op-Ed piece, Math Lessons for Locovores is worth the read and certain to provoke discussion. If you’ve not encountered an interesting site called Grist, it has a good vitural roundtable discussion addressing this Op-Ed story.
Wow! A two page letter on scallops, I’ll have to have a laugh about that with Olivier tonight.
You do make a valid point: The Farmhouse is very good at fixing a dish that might not be to your liking or prepared wrong.