There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.

That puts personally curated travel docs and word of mouth back in play as Thrillist describes here. Every Dutch person has or knows somebody who has a Berlin Google Doc with all the Geheimtipps. Dutch people’s tastes are fairly predictable and pedestrian, so these’ll mostly be cheap Asian eateries in Prenzlauerberg but that’s also fine.

For me the most interesting recommendations for Berlin but also for other cities come through TikTok. The algorithm is well tuned to my type of person and in the short videos it’s pretty easy to size up whether somebody knows what they’re talking about or not.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/google-docs-are-the-ideal-travel-guides

December Adventure

So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.

I saw this thing called December Adventure though and that fits in nicely with my current push to release a major update for Cuppings. If I’m going to be programming until late this month, then I’d prefer it to be on something that I can release.

I can’t promise that I won’t do any AoC (Factor is looking mighty cool) but I won’t force myself to do anything. With that, let’s get going.

1/12

I started working on the map view which clicking around looked like it could be really annoying. I found some dead ends and was afraid I’d have to hack in Leaflet support myself but I found a dioxus example hidden in the leaflet-rs repository.

Yes, I’m writing this website in Rust/WASM, why do you ask?

That example required a bunch of fiddling with the configuration and a couple of false starts, but now I have a vanilla map view.

I can say that I’m amazed that in this ecosystem 1. an example exists 2. that example works 3. it works in my project with a bit of diffing and 4. it seems to do what I need.

I raised a PR to the project to advertise this example on its README just like it does the others so that others wouldn’t have to search like I did. That PR got merged:

https://github.com/slowtec/leaflet-rs/pull/36

2/12

Today I’ll see if I can tweak the map view to show the location of the cafe we tapped and get things to a point where I can commit the change.

To do this I need to figure out how to pass information along to a router when we tap a venue. That should be easy enough but the Dioxus documentation is between 0.5 and 0.6 now and a lot of it is broken.

A tip from the Discord said I need to put the data into a context from a parent and then get it out again in a child. It’s a bit roundabout and required some refactoring, but it works.

Done on time even for a reasonable bed time.

3/12

Turns out my changes from yesterday did not make it to the staging server. I’ll fix that and manually run the job again.

That’s these annoying wasm-bindgen version errors that keep happening and that require a reinstall of this: cargo install -f wasm-bindgen-cli --version 0.2.97 and the dioxus-cli. Dioxus which by the way is preparing its long awaited 0.6.0 release.

Yes, I build this on the same Hetzner box that hosts it. So here you go: https://staging.cuppin.gs

Other than that not that much will happen today since I spent most of the evening noodling around with Factor (despite my intention not to do any weird programming). It’s a nice language that’s very similar to Uiua which I tried out a while back but not being an array programming language makes it feel somewhat more ergonomic.

4/12

I can’t describe how nice it is to wake up and not have to deal with a mediocre story line involving elves and try to find time to attack a programming problem.

After today, I’m going to need that quiet morning, because I spent until 01:30 debugging an issue: Going to a detail view from the frontpage worked, but loading a detail view directly would throw an error.

There were two issues at play here:

Leaflet maps don’t deal well with being created multiple times so either we have to call `map.remove() or we have to check whether the map has already been created and keep a reference to it somehow.

I solved it by pushing the map into a global variable:

thread_local!(static MAP: RefCell> = RefCell::new(None));

These are Rust constructs I would normally never use so that’s interesting. More interesting is that they work in one go and that they work on the WASM target.

Then the error was gone but the page was blank. Not entirely sure what was happening I poked at the DOM to see all the map elements there but simply not visible. Turns out that because of the different path, the path for the stylesheet was being added to the URL like this: http://127.0.0.1:8080/venue/176/main.css

It just has these two lines:

#map {
    width: 100%;
    height: 100vh;
}

But without a height the map is invisible.

Both issues are solved but not committed. I’ll see tomorrow whether I’m happy with the solution and how to package this up. Also I’m not sure how main.css is being served on production and whether the same fix will work there.

5/12

I couldn’t help but noodle on Advent of Code a bit. Here’s my day 1 part 1 in Factor: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor

I like Factor the programming language. It’s like Lisp or Haskell but without all the annoying bits.

The environment that’s provided with it, I’m not so keen about. It’s annoying to use and has lots of weird conventions that aren’t very ergonomic.

6/12

I’ve been bad and I’ve finished part 2 of day 1 of the Advent of Code: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/blob/main/2024/day-01/day-01.factor#L27

Not so December Adventure after all maybe. I’ll promise I’ll finish the mapping improvements I was working on tomorrow.

7/12

Went on my weekly long bike ride. Then in the evening I didn’t have that much energy for programming other than finishing Advent of Code day 3 part 1: https://github.com/alper/advent-of-code/commit/0a74c38e7641141e10b4c48203c9e414cc492e1c

(I looked at day 2 part 2 but that just looked very tedious.)

8/12

Got in a ton of commits on Cuppin.gs today. After fixing the map, I wanted to see what would happen if I would add all 2000 markers to the map.

Performance seems to be doable but this is probably not ideal for a webpage. Dynamically rendering the venues is something for later. For now I can probably get away with filtering for the 100-200 nearest locations by distance and dumping those into the map view.

Now I’m back debugging Github Actions. I’m splitting up the build and deploy of the backend and the frontend into separate actions. Compiling dioxus-cli takes forever which is a step I hope I can skip with cargo-binstall.

Iterating on Github Actions takes forever and there really doesn’t seem to be a better way to develop this or a better CI solution that everybody is willing to use.

10/12

Spent some hours massaging the data that goes into the app. I had to add all new venues and after that I wanted to check whether any place in our 2k venue set had closed so we can take them off the display. This is a somewhat tedious multi-step process.

I have an admin binary that calls the Google Maps API for each venue to check the venue data and the business status (CLOSED_TEMPORARILY and such). But to be able to do that you have to feed each place ID into the API. The only issue with place IDs is that they expire from time to time. There’s a free API call that you can use to refresh them.

That expiration does not happen that often. What happens more, I found, is that a place will disappear entirely of Google Maps. For some reason it will be deleted. I don’t handle that case yet so there my updaters break entirely and the quickest fix around it is to delete the venue from the database and restart.

The only data issue that I still have outstanding is when venues move their location to a different address. I have a place around here that I think is still showing on its old spot.

11/12

Tried to run Cuppings in Xcode to be met with some weird compilation errors. Turns out that there’s an Expression type in Foundation that’s overriding my SQLite.swift Expression. It’s a pretty silly reason for code to be broken: Expression – name space conflict with Xcode 16/iOS 18

Also still fighting with the frontend deployments which seem to need a --frozen passed to them to not proactively go update package versions.

14/12

Love to have a crash on startup for the Cuppings TestFlight build and then sit down today to bake a new one and upload that and for that one to work. No clue what the issue was even though I took a look at the crashlog (that I sent in myself).

I’ve also automated building the iOS app to be done by Xcode Cloud which should making new versions (whenever the database is updated) a lot easier.

16/12

Upgraded the frontend to Dioxus 0.6.0 which just came out and has lots of quality of life issues. For my case, I did not need to change a single line of code, just change some version numbers and build a new dioxus-cli.

Nice TUI for serving the frontend

I hope that maybe solves the wasm-bindgen issues on the frontend deploy. The annoying part about the build is that it takes so long that it’s very hard to iterate on.

It’s too late even for me to see what this does. I’m off to bed. You may or may not get a new version of the website by tomorrow morning.

18/12

Spent some iterations running the frontend deploy and rerunning it but now it should be working.

22/12

I spent the evening doing manual data munging and correcting some venue locations that hadn’t been updated correctly through my data life cycle.

That forced me to clarify the two name fields the venues table has.

  • name was the original name field and was pulled from the Foursquare metadata
  • google_name is the name field that’s pulled from Google Maps and was effectively leading but not updated correctly yet when refreshing the data

So to figure that out I did a bunch of auditing in the list to see venues where there was a large discrepancy between the names. Something that happens is that a place will change its name but keep the same location and Google Maps place.

I also added a label to the iOS app to indicate whether this is a DEBUG build but that messed up the layout and I guess I might as well remove it. Sometimes I get confused what I’m running, but since it’s just me running DEBUG builds on their phone, I think I can do without.

I also started a rewrite that I’m not sure I’m going to pull over the line: I wanted to remove the search dependency on Alpine.js and replace it with htmx. For this I asked Cursor to do the translation which it did a stab at but ultimately rather failed to do even the basic steps for it. Then I did it myself and while htmx is super easy to setup, the data juggling I have to do with what I get from Google Maps is very fragile and needs to be cleaned up (which I may or may not do given that things are working right now).

23/12

Working with the backend was very annoying because every time the server restarts, it would log me out. To fix that I changed the persistency of tower-sessions from MemoryStore to FileSessionStorage and that fixed it without issues. There is now a .sessions folder in the backend which needs to be ignored for cargo watch but other than that it’s a drop-in replacement.

That means I will need to write a logout view at some point.

I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.

That has two direct consequences for me:

  • I was going to scrub the Foursquare data out of the database as a clean-up but that’s something I won’t do for now. In fact, I may recode the venues so I have ids in both worlds.
  • I was toying around with the idea of building a next generation Foursquare/Dopplr on top of atproto which is something that I think is a lot more feasible now.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source-places/

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

https://twitter.com/dens/status/1409506346391719941

The types of resistance available to women are particularly interesting: They themselves understand their daily tasks — the upkeep of their homes and the care of their families — as a form of steadfast resistance.

An interesting point how the women in Gaza play a big part in the resistance with these ‘weapons of the weak’ that they have.

http://www.warscapes.com/retrospectives/food/kitchen-anthropology-gaza

“Drinking has to be against the rules for taking a drink to be breaking the rules. Only a Muslim can know how good that tastes.”

An amazing dive into the popularity of Johnny Walker Black in the Muslim world.

I remember the penchant of a certain kind of man to whiskey when I was a kid and how it would be used as an (expensive) present or bribe. I bet that in most of those cases it was also Black Label that they were going for.

https://theoutline.com/post/8280/how-johnnie-walker-black-became-the-house-liquor-of-the-muslim-world?zd=1&zi=dnzv3qcl

Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp”to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.

A monster post about how China feeds itself which I hope isn’t totally made up.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able-to-provide-enough-food-to-feed-its-population-of-over-1-billion-people-Do-they-import-food-or-are-they-self-sustainable

Trying out the McB.

I finally got the chance of trying out the McB, McDonald’s new ecological burger tonight after a visit to the opera.

Trying out the McB, the McDonald's bio burger

First I think it’s great that McDonald’s is doing this. It would be nice if they switched all their meat to what is at least a nominally biologically produced variety. I’ve seen people hating on it but large food producers having to shift over is a sign of victory. Read this Fortune article about the war on Big Food.

Second I don’t think McDonald’s understands why it is that people eat organical food. I and many others eat it because it tastes better than the other stuff. There are other reasons to eat organically but if those were the only ones then it would be nowhere near as popular as it is now. The problem with the McB is that it’s just as bad a hamburger as you are used to eating from McDonald’s but now with a bio patty.

This makes it a great burger for the staunch McDonald’s customer who was thinking of switching away because they started worrying about meat quality. For Berlin’s actual burger lovers this is irrelevant and you should just keep going to Tommi.

Week 330

A new coffee place had reportedly opened up in the area and I went out searching for it. Concierge is tucked into a gate on Paul-Lincke-Ufer and they are really nice guys pulling quality shots. It is amazing both that this part of Berlin which was quite barren when it comes to coffee is shaping up so nicely and also that

Concierge Coffee, opening party tonight. Namy, Dutch guy, making a flat white for me.

That week we went into our Open State board meeting where everything is picking up in pace considerably. After that I just made it to the drinks of the Upfront UG which was a lot of fun.

We started ideation and building of an app for the piazza+social media platform which I’m rather excited about. More on that over on the Hubbub blog soon.

I will be speaking at the Retune conference in my hometown on the subject of games with a purpose and our creative process. It looks like a super nice conference and I would love to meet you here.

Roof terrace barbecue

Our office landlords invited us to join them in a celebration on our building’s roof terrace. It’s been a while since I was on one of those and they look like mandatory facilities for anybody living in Berlin. I’m putting it my list of required utilities for the next KANT office.

Kim Chi Fries!!!

Just to prove the awesomeness of Berlin, we just had a Korean food shack opening here (besides the already rather large offering of Korean cuisine that Berlin has). I had my first Kimchi Fries there, which I think is indeed best described as a Korean kapsalon.

Out camping with the fixie

On Friday I just handled a last bit of business for the week and then went off to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MeckPom) for a bit of kayaking and canoeing which is about all there is to do in that part of Germany. It is a state that is trying to cope with severe shrinkage and because of its sparse population lends itself particularly well to forays into nature. I saw lots of animals and their young and definitely learned the difference between a kayak and a canoe. Also: bringing an aeropress can make situations much more bearable.

Spent some time paddling, saw an Adler and now at the campsite making an aeropress with the inverted method while terror dad behind me puts up the tent.

Amsterdam Culinary Desert

I just read the double interview in Amsterdam Weekly with Johannes van Dam and Undercover Glutton. It is a lovely interview and their combined knowledge of food is certainly impressive. What I am a bit less impressed with is their knowledge of metropolitan cuisine. At one point in the interview van Dam extolls the culinary variety in Amsterdam and there I must take offense. I have traversed the city far and wide and I have come up empty more often than not for many a dish. Eventually I gave up and moved to warmer culinary climes.

Unfindable Treats

The problem in Amsterdam first and foremost is that many dishes and types of food lack proper representation. There are even entire cuisines missing. It is a long list, but below follows an attempt to distill my years of disappointment:

Breakfast
Try to find a place in Amsterdam to have a decent meal1 at 08:00 and you’ll come up empty. This is tied mainly with the departure of blue collar work from the city and the city getting a more languid touristy character. There’s the mad commute around 08:00, but nobody goes in for breakfast except a take-away coffee and croissant.

Brunch of any type
Tied to the previous, there is hardly a brunch offering to speak of. This is a ridiculous poverty compared to San Francisco or even Copenhagen. Most Sunday’s are highly improved by this type of food, though it can also very quickly degenerate into a fad.

Full English breakfast and the British kitchen
There are a couple of touristy places offering something like the Full English and there’s one lunch place that does a meagre version, but the city all in all lacks greasy spoons. The British have elevated eating disgusting things to an art and we should take notice. With the breakfast already unattainable, don’t even look for more specialty offerings such as the Scottish Egg or Welsh Rarebit. Relatedly I have not been able to find a reliable and affordable source of Eggs Benedict in the city in my years.

BBQ
London has recently been treated to the best BBQ this side of the pond with the opening of Pitt Cue but Amsterdam doesn’t even sport an attempt at this discipline. The festival of the Rolling Kitchens had some attempts in this direction, but the quantities were not enough for the appetite of the audience and an availability of one week a year does not amount to much.

East-European or Russian cuisine
In the Netherlands we pretend that Eastern Europe does not exist, except for Polish people who we use for scapegoating or when our pipes are clogged. The Slavic treats of Borsht, Perogi and the likes, are impossible to find and in the whole of Amsterdam there is not even one Russian or similar restaurant.

Ramen
There is currently one location in Amsterdam that does Tonkotsu Ramen and does it excellently but it only serves them a handful hours every week. You do not need to be a nippophile to be hit by a sudden ramen craving, but you will be coming up empty.

Burrito
There is also now only one place in Amsterdam that does an acceptable burrito and it is swamped on Sunday evenings. It isn’t Californian, but that is a minor detail.

Proper Coffee
Coffee in Amsterdam has been improving and there are some players that have upped the city’s game reliably. That success has however prompted a lot of douche places that look nice, but where the coffee is undrinkable. Add to that, some places (outside of the center) ask €2,50 for a mediocre cappuccino. Kees Kraakman is about to open up North any day now which will give that area a much needed caffeine boost but overall it is not enough.

Pasteis de Nata
Here in Berlin you are nearly smothered in this treat at an affordable price (the same in London). In Amsterdam, they are near unfindable and expensive when you do. The general pastry situation is laughably poor compared to either Lisbon or Paris.

Taco adds the following:

@alpercugun Add to lacks: really good tapas, more than one korean restaurant, authentic schezuan, good southern US style BBQ —Taco Ekkel

I treated the BBQ above. I can agree about the Korean offerings which are few and too expensive. I rarely ate tapas because most taperias are ballententen. And I have never had Schezuan, so I can’t comment on that.

Problems in the Fabric of Eating

The shortcomings above may be fixed in the future, but progress will be slow and incomplete because the Amsterdam culinary scene is broken on a deeper level. I can best explain that using two factors:

No 24 hour availability
Peter reminded me of this one, which is pretty important. I have long bemoaned the lack of a 24h diner in Amsterdam. I would take any diner by now, but for a city pretending to be international, the lack of food options for a traveller touching down on Schiphol between 02:00 and 07:00 is rather dismaying. Amsterdam is not ‘the city that never sleeps’, so much is clear, but allowing the people that don’t sleep to cater for themselves, would be tolerant for a start.

This is a symptom of the Dutch mentality to create rules for everything, even the things that would otherwise sort themselves out. Dutch regelzucht nips a lot of otherwise nice things in the bud. This has effects on the opening times of restaurants, but also on the (im)possibility of food carts and other displays of eating and drinking outdoors, but probably also on the ways you can prepare food and who you can hire to do that. I’m not advocating total abandon of rules here, but I am quite sure the Dutch implementation errs too far on the side of caution.

Absurdly poor price/quality ratio
The rampant inflation of housing in the city also has had an effect on culinary offerings. People paying upwards of €1200/month in rent, don’t quaff at a single sit-down dinner costing around €20 for the simplest of meals2.

Many of those people are new entrants to Amsterdam which is the biggest city they have experienced thusfar. These people are really nice and they mean well, but they are still hicks who are easily impressed by the trappings of the big city village that Amsterdam is. Their newfound abundance in cash and lack of taste spoils the market and makes good options for the discerning eater, harder to find.

Conclusion

The fact that Johannes would not mention these issues and he gives Turkish charcoal grill after charcoal grill 9 marks every week3, testifies to his age and his local knowledge. Most of the people I know consume food with a global or at least an European perspective and given the best there is on offer there, Amsterdam cannot compete.

I know the scene is improving and ever in flux, so some of the things I have mentioned above may no longer be true, but I haven’t even been gone two months yet. Additions and discoveries are of course welcome here or via more private channels.

  1. None of this granola/muesli crap, eggs at least. []
  2. I pay half that in Berlin. []
  3. Nothing wrong with that, I love ocakbasi. []

Coffee Magic

I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.

In Utrecht studio proceedings are supported by the Village which may quite well pour the best coffee in the Netherlands. This is how they do it:

Coffee as catching up

I was already in the habit of starting my mornings drinking the best coffee in Amsterdam at Stumptown and would regularly chat with the mayor. After planning some morning meetings there, getting an early start, drinking great coffee and having a good conversation with people you’d normally not talk to, proved to be a good idea.

So I opened a collaborative document with my free spots to see if people would be interested in meeting. Early, just for coffee and just for an hour. This is going quite nicely so far, and I’m going to see if I can fill it up for the entire duration of Stumptown’s run here in Amsterdam.

I’ve still got a free spot for next week and will post my schedule for the week after shortly. Signup at the Wave:

Ambitieuze koffie in Stumptown

Via Johan Schaap kwam ik op het spoor van een popup store van Stumptown Coffee Roasters hier in Amsterdam op de Albert Cuyp (4sq).

Popup stores zijn vet en nu is de Albert Cuyp niet het armoedigste deel van de stad wat betreft caffeïne-toevoer, maar zoals in het artikel in de Times ook te lezen staat:

I’ve gotten to really know the city. But I’ve tried to find good coffee, and it’s been challenging. It’s way underdeveloped compared to the U.S., or even London or Scandinavia.

Dat is serieus waar. Mensen hebben hier geen smaak of budget voor goede koffie. In de meeste café’s krijg je een verbrande halve kop espresso, met enkele goede uitzonderingen. Het personeel (‘baristas’ hebben we hier niet) neemt het werk ook niet serieus en is niet ontvankelijk voor constructief commentaar.

Laatst bij de Koffiesalon kreeg ik van de jongen achter de bar triomfantelijk “nog een beetje extra melk”in mijn kopje gekwakt. De koffie die je uitserveert is goed, of hij is het niet. Rot op met je extra beetje melk.

Ik verheug me op mijn eerste bezoek aan Stumptown. Het moet wel goed zijn. Slechter kan in elk geval niet.

Update:

Bar(ista)

Ik ben er geweest en de koffie is er inderdaad fantastisch. Nu maar hopen dat ze blijven.

Restauranten gevraagd

Ik hou van veel en lekker eten en ik merk dat ik daarmee in het buitenland beter terecht kan dan in Amsterdam. Hier een paar restaurant-tips die voor mij in Amsterdam ontbreken en waarvan ik denk dat ze weleens een succes kunnen worden.

Mochten ze al bestaan dan hoor ik het graag. Mocht iemand ze willen beginnen dan zou ik het erg op prijs stellen.

Burgermeester

De Burgermeester

CC foto door tjeemz

De Burgermeester is mijn voorbeeld van zo’n niche in de Amsterdamse horeca die niet bediend werd. Hier is recent de Burgermesteer geopend en deze loopt nu prima.

Voordat de Burgermeester er was, moest je heel goed zoeken in Amsterdam om een grote culinaire burger te kunnen vinden1. De burger had hier blijkbaar teveel een fast food associatie en was verplicht smerig.

Succesvoorbeelden uit het buitenland genoeg en dan in het bijzonder de Burgermeister, Marienburger en Kreuzburger-achtige tenten in Berlijn.

Taqueria

Je ziet ze heel veel in Californië en Texas, de taquerías waar je voor weinig geld een goed gevulde burrito met vlees, bonen en rijst met daarbij hete sausen, guacamole en nachos kunt krijgen. Er gaat geen dag voorbij dat ik niet aan een burrito denk. Toen ik in San Francisco was at ik het ongeveer om de dag. Als ik er ooit heen zou verhuizen, zouden de taquerías een belangrijke reden daarvoo zijn.

Dolores Gourmet Burritos

CC foto door bovinity

In Europa bestaat er al een imitatie in de vorm van Dolores vlakbij Alexanderplatz in Berlijn. Kenners vinden het misschien niet vergelijkbaar, maar het is heel fijn om in de Duitse winterkou dit stukje Californië tegen te komen.

In Amsterdam is er bij mij in de buurt de Taco Shop die ik nog moet uitproberen, maar meer keuze zou niet gek zijn.

Update: The Taco Shop uitgeprobeerd en deze was best ok en ook goede prijs/kwantiteitsverhouding. Geen burritos verpakt in aluminiumfolie zoals ik gewend ben, maar goed te eten. Volgende keer de Chimichanga bestellen.

24 sep 2009

24h Diner

diner stools

CC foto door MBK

Meestal moet ik er niet aan denken om na het uitgaan complete burgermaaltijden of stacks van pannekoeken met maple syrup weg te moeten werken, maar als het dan ergens kan, dan in het comfort van een mooie klassieke diner.

Soms heb je gewoon laat nog honger en trek in lekker eten. Daar is in Amsterdam nog steeds moeilijk aan te komen. Waar ga je heen na 0:00 voor niet-shoarma of patat? Ik denk dat één diner-achtig restaurant wat 24 uur per dag open is ergens in het centrum, op heel veel bezoekers kan rekenen.

In ‘n Out Burger

In-N-Out

CC foto door Thomas Hawk

Het ‘gezonde’ fast food van de In ‘n Out Burger heeft als West-Amerikaans fenomeen een allure die moeilijk uit te leggen is. Feit is wel dat de burgers en de frieten er heel lekker zijn en dat het een sympathiek concept is tussen de grote ketens in de Verenigde Staten.

Greasy Spoon

Eggs, Chips and Beans

Pas in Shepherdess Cafe in Hackney het klassieke Engelse eten geprobeerd en dat was een succes! Alleen zó jammer dat we dat hier niet hebben; niet een goede plek om Engels eten te eten, niet een serie greasy spoons en eigenlijk helemaal geen plaatsen waar je voor £7 ( = €7) kunt zitten en lekker veel kunt eten.

Ik denk dat deze concepten mits goed uitgevoerd grote successen kunnen worden en in de meeste gevallen niche-vullers zullen zijn (zoals de Burgermeester nu is). Dus een slimme restaurateur kan hier zijn slag slaan en mijn buik vullen. Of moet ik toch naar San Francisco verhuizen?

  1. In Kopenhagen kun je ze bijvoorbeeld overal krijgen. []

Night Store

My friendly neighborhood night store will gladly give me a plastic bag for every item of shopping I buy from them1. This is pretty thoughtful and at the same time also pretty short-sighted.
Now there seem to be some places in the world that have banned plastic bags though I’m not sure which ones. It is a pretty contentious issue. It seems to be difficult or something but it’s not exactly clear why that is. We’re one of the technically most advanced societies in the world and we can’t live without plastic bags?

I wasn’t very hungry so instead of my regular döner I got some green pistachio baklava. This stuff is so ridiculously delicious it explodes into pure sugar and pistachio in your mouth and it fills you up pretty fast. I don’t get why you would buy mass-produced candy from the supermarket. If you want to get fat, why not get fat eating good stuff?

Now if only I could find a place around here2 that sells künefe, things would get really crazy.


Picture by elifayse

  1. As well they should if you see the markup they’re charging. []
  2. Den Haag or Rotterdam will do. []