Tea Leaves

This is the first part of an article on the Tea Leaves amari tasting panel. Today we will talk about the arrangements and participants, and tomorrow we will discuss the panel’s reactions to the liqueurs.

Their names roll off the tongue: Fernet. Nonino. Averna. Their tastes — unusual, herbal, and exotic — can seem almost indescribable. They are the amari, powerful Italian digestifs.

My first exposure to amari came in Italy. Standing in a bar sipping a macchiato, a somewhat grizzled gentleman walked in and said, in a gravelly voice, “Averna”. The barkeep poured a thick, dangerous looking liquid into a shotglass, the gentleman finished in a gulp, put the glass on the bar, and walked out. I asked the barista what it was, and he explained that it was a digestivo. “It’s something you might drink if your stomach was a little unsettled.”

Later in the same trip, after a long day of walking in the sun, I felt a bit queasy. “Obviously, alcohol is the solution to this problem,” I said to myself. In the next bar I came to, I said “Averna,” trying as best I could to sound like I knew what I was getting myself into.

It was not like other drinks. It was strong-tasting, but also subtle. It was sweet. And it was bitter. And it did settle my stomach.

Standing next to me at the bar was an older Italian man, staring at me. I nodded a greeting. “How can you drink that stuff?” he said, in English. I asked him what he meant. He shook his head sadly. “You people, you British, you Americans, you come over here and you drink all these awful things. I don’t understand. We don’t drink that stuff. We drink whisky.” He gestured with his glass for emphasis. I shrugged, and he wandered away, tumbler of scotch in hand.

Something about the strangeness of that encounter left a mark on me. I was curious about these unfamiliar drinks. In Italy they are valued for their medicinal and digestive properties. In America, the only liqueur of this style that could be called popular is the German Jägermeister, a concoction favored by college students because of the apocryphal belief that the various herbs in it will have a cough-syrup like effect on the imbiber. Why are the amari so ignored here?

The theory I’ve come up with is: fear. Trillin’s syndrome, the fear that someone else ordered a better meal than you did, applies to beer, wine, and liquor as well. In America, alcohol is very much a social lubricant, a prop, a badge of identity, and a point of discussion. Ordering a drink you don’t like is more than just a let-down, it’s actually a social faux-pas. “Are you so naive that you don’t even know what you like to drink?” But of course, the only way to learn what to order, if you’re not willing to experiment, is to mimic others. Which brings us to our present situation, where there are only five drinks (not counting beer, wine, and slurpees with booze in them) that most people ever order: gin and tonic, rum and coke, vodka and anything, whiskey, and the martini. And the martini has been so emasculated that most people who drink them still don’t know what vermouth tastes like.

Fear can be overcome by knowledge. That, more than anything, was what motivated me to create a tasting panel for amari. The panel’s goal was to taste some of the best Italian amari and describe them in enough detail that people could order them (or buy them at a liquor store) and have some idea of what they were about to try. With that in mind, I contacted Lidia’s of Pittsburgh restaurant in the Strip District — they have the best amari selection in the region — and asked them if they were interested in sponsoring the tasting.

Dave Wagner

Dave Wagner, the managing partner at Lidia’s, got in touch with me. When you float a proposal about an event like this, you expect that you might hear back from a store manager, or from the organization’s special events coordinator. What you don’t expect is for one of the owners to get a hold of you and say “Yes, this is a great idea. We’re going to do it.” But that’s exactly what happened, which is one reason why I’m about to say some very nice things about Lidia’s. The other reason is that I happen to love the place.

What consistently impresses me about Lidia’s is that their ambition precisely matches their abilities, and they know it. From the decor straight down to the details of the menu, Lidia’s manages to be both elegant and modestly understated at the same time. Every time I walk into the place I am confused by how they manage this. I imagine the restaurant itself speaking to me: “Oh, that chandelier that you can’t take your eyes off of? That’s just made from some blown glass. We apologize that it’s not nicer.” “These perfectly-executed ravioli? Why, the mixture inside is very simple, just spinach and cheese. We hope you like it.” “Ah, yes, we have this wine list with some very unassuming wines. We figured we’d just charge $20 for each of them. Is that OK?”

You can walk in dressed to the nines and feel perfectly at home, but if you show up in jeans and a t-shirt they don’t give you even the slightest whiff of attitude (I know: I’ve done it). I think the secret to the place is that the atmosphere is firmly focused on being a complement to the food, rather than the other way around. It’s part of their presentation, it enhances the experience, but fundamentally what they are selling is well-executed, straightforward Italian cuisine. The dishes are not presented as more than they are, but neither are they dumbed down. And they love their own food.

It is this that came through when talking to Dave Wagner about amari. Lidia’s estimates that they probably sell, overall, maybe a bottle or two of amari over the course of a year. That’s how few people drink these liqueurs. And while I’ve no doubt that some people are going to try amari as a result of reading these articles, I’m sure Mr. Wagner doesn’t expect the Amari Division of Lidia’s to suddenly become a huge profit center overnight. They sponsored our panel tasting because they love amari, and think it would be wonderful if more people learned about them. They did it because they care about eating and drinking. The next time you have a lousy meal at a pretentious restaurant, ask yourself if you think they actually care about their food. And if you answer “no,” then do yourself a favor and make a reservation at Lidia’s, instead.

Based on his enthusiasm, his experience, and his interest, then, Dave Wagner was the first member of our panel. Allow me to introduce the others.

Lidia Bastianich

Lidia Bastianich

I was surprised and delighted that Lidia joined us on the panel. She’s a chef, an author, a restauranteur, and a TV personality, and was preparing to celebrate her Pittsburgh restaurant’s 4th anniversary. Her plate, so to speak, was absolutely full. I thought she might come, shake hands, say a few words about amari in general, and leave.

Instead, she sat down, ate with us, and spent two hours talking with us about food, amari, and culture. She was gracious and witty. It only takes about five minutes with her to understand the restaurant’s attitude towards food. She speaks of food as something that isn’t only sustaining and pleasing, but spiritually fulfilling as well. She doesn’t just love food, she respects it.

But more than that, she listened. It would have been easy for her to simply assume the role of teacher and tell us which drinks we should like, and why. Instead, she was interested in seeing how our various palates reacted to the different amari, and how we felt about them. It was an honor to have dined with her.

John Barbera

John Barbera

John Barbera is an architect at the firm of Penner and Associates. John rescued us at the last moment when one of our panelists fell ill and couldn’t make it. The thing about John is: he’s a perfectionist. I have a feeling this is a trait that serves him well in his work. The other thing about John is that he wears these cool architect glasses. A few months ago, I read an article in the New York Times that, in summary, said “Architects wear cooler glasses than the rest of us.” After reading that article, I started paying attention, and I realized the author was right. If I wore John’s glasses, I would look dorky, but on him they look great.

I suspect that there must be some sort of fashion class in the last year of architecture programs where they teach you how to wear the cool glasses and still look good.

I need to take this class.

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett has seven years of experience in arts and architecture management working in for-profit and non-profit sectors. Currently, Kilolo works at Cool Space Locator, a nonprofit community and economic real estate organization. She matches small businesses to unique spaces in urban neighborhoods. After earning her Bachelor of Arts in History of Art and Architecture from University of Pittsburgh in 1998, Kilolo worked as a summer art instructor for Manchester Craftmen’s Guild. She was the curatorial assistant at The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Wood Street Galleries. She is actively involved in numerous civic and cultural organizations. Recently, she served on the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Public Art Committee, and was selected by the Pittsburgh Foundation and Heinz Endowments as a working group member
for The Creativity Project.

Kilolo, in other words, is awesome. Any uncertainty about how the event would go evaporated once Kilolo agreed to be involved. It is a metaphysical impossibility for any event with which she is involved to go wrong.

Steve Posti

Steve Posti

Steve is a librarian, a would-be farmer and a dad. Originally from Pittsburgh, he and his wife lived in South Florida for 12 years before returning to Pittsburgh in 2003.

Steve was, in fact, the very first person to volunteer for the tasting panel. I was a bit nervous inviting someone that I hadn’t met to be on the panel, but Steve is a librarian. I like librarians. So for the record let me say: if you’re going to go out and drink, you definitely want a librarian with you. Steve asked interesting questions, kept the conversation moving, and was a great contributor. I’m glad he was there.

Steve and his family live in Mt. Lebanon, where his wife Jo is running for a seat on the
school board.

Ann Funge

Ann Funge

“I’m just a chick from Jersey,” Ann claims, but the truth isn’t that simple. Ann strides the halls of the law offices of Wilder & Mahood, bringing hope to her clients and striking fear into the hearts of her opponents. Ann’s sharp wit is matched only by her overflowing compassion for beasts and children. Balancing a nearly insatiable curiosity for the use of arts and sciences to bring peace and prosperity to all with a frankly down to earth sensibility about the efficacy of mangonels and trébuchets to forcefully end sieges of walled cities, Ann is a true renaissance woman. Perhaps her most significant character trait, though, is her nearly beatific willingness to not sue me for fabricating almost everything in her biography.

My biggest fear in inviting Ann to participate was that she wouldn’t be able to find time in her schedule to make it. Fortunately, I was able to entice her by exploiting her fascination with my motives. “Wait, so you for write this weblog thing. And…how do you make money on it? You mean you just called up Lidia’s and asked them to sponsor this? Why are you doing this, really?” I’m pretty sure that she still thinks I have some master plan to option the movie rights to “The Amari Tasting Story” and retire to Tahiti, but of course, nothing could be further from the truth. (Note to Hollywood: Have your people call my people. Let’s do lunch.)

Laura Valentine

Laura Valentine

Laura is willing to try almost anything in the interests of science, as long as it is fun or presents a high potential for hilarity. Unfortunately, her husband will not let her dye the cats with Easter egg dye, but this is only a temporary setback in her research into rainbow-colored kittens. Other hobbies include smoking cigars, gardening, and frothing criticism of prepackaged foodstuffs.

Laura is also the author of one of my favorite food weblogs, Upside-Down Pear. She doesn’t flood you with useless articles on everything she thinks of, but instead picks her battles, and is always right about everything.

I was sure Laura was a good choice because she’s well-spoken, and while culinarily adventurous, she would not see the adventure as an end in and of itself. In other words, I knew that Laura would be willing to stand up and announce, in the face of peer pressure to be noncomittally nice, “This is terrible.”

Laura also cares about words, an attribute that I think is generally admirable.

Peterb

Your Humble Narrator

And, of course, I was there too.

The guidelines for the panel were straightforward. Be bold in your opinions. Express preferences. Try to describe what you’re drinking, not show how sophisticated you are. I wanted to take these vague adjectives people use about amari — “bitter,” “assertive” and the like — and turn them in to specific descriptions, so that someone who hasn’t tried them might have some idea of what they’ll find if they try one.

The stage was set. The panel had arrived. Six bottles and forty-eight glasses waited on a nearby table.

But first we had to eat.

Amari are digestivi. They lie on that odd fault line between the sensual and the medicinal. At one point, I had suggested that we could dispense with a full meal, because I was eager to get to the drinks. Lidia’s lips pursed ever so slightly. “They’re meant to be enjoyed at the end of a meal,” she said. There was the merest suggestion of a sigh. “But, if that’s how you want to do it….” Immediately aware that I had just suggested something equivalent to ordering tiramisu as an appetizer, I quickly backed off and tried to recover. “No, no. We should do it, uh, exactly the way you just suggested. In every way. Uh, ma’am.”

We spoke of the history of amari throughout the meal. People have been infusing alcoholic drinks with herbs since antiquity for reasons of both preservation and taste. Lidia traces the Italian amaro tradition back to the Romans, although our modern vermouth is probably closer to their drink than are today’s distilled amari. One can try to guess at the ingredients, but they are typically many, varied, and kept absolutely secret. Dave Wagner told the story of the time he was visiting makers of Amaro Nonino, in Friuli, and asked them to give him at least a hint of what went in to their infusion. “Of course,” his host smiled, “just as soon as you tell me the formula for Coca-Cola.”

While you may never know the full list of ingredients for any one amaro, there are certain ingredients that appear again and again. Anise regularly appears, as do juniper berries. The flavor of wormwood can often be detected. In the fruitier amari, the most common starring role is given to the bitter orange (Citrus Auranium var. Myrtifolia, which the Italians call chinotto.) No two amari taste exactly the same.

The tasting begins

We spoke also of the restaurant itself — why Pittsburgh was chosen (”It’s a manageable location, midway between New York and Kansas City,”) and the constant quest for fresh local ingredients. We spoke of the work they’ve done with local farmers. “When we first arrived, we couldn’t even find rapini. It was terrible. Now, fortunately, things are much better.” I mentioned my delight at finding that their executive chef Craig Richards enjoyed Tram’s Kitchen, one of my favorite unassuming local restaurants, which has great food but no atmosphere. Dave Wagner smiled. “Of course. Especially with chefs, you’ll find that it’s really all about the food.”

As dinner came to a close, the plates were cleared away, leaving us with an array of empty glasses. The bottles were passed around, and we began to pour. The waiting was over. Now, after all the talk and anticipation, we would put our palates to the test.

In the next installment: the Tea Leaves panel tries to describe the indescribable. Please read it here.

I picked up the new Splinter Cell game tonight at the Target. I’ve only played through the level that was recently on the Xbox demo disk, but I feel that I have to give Ubisoft a big wet sloppy kiss for listening to the forces of light and goodness and implementing quick saves, save anywhere and faster load times all in one fell swoop. This one act of kindness removes the only tedious and annoying aspect of the previous Splinter Cell games.

The quick saves are so good that I can even face replaying a level just to see if I can finish it with a higher “rating” (more sneaking, less killing). I can do this because there is no hateful savepoint system making me replay the level five times just to get to the end. Basically, there is no downside, and anyone who says there is cannot be trusted as anything more than a raving lunatic moron.

Bravo Ubisoft. Let’s hope other developers follow their lead.

Driving home from work on Friday night, we noticed a strange sight for Pittsburgh. A couple of dozen young people decked out in the Pierced Goth look that is prevelant among today’s “non-conformist” youth were riding down Fifth Avenue connected to bicycles via fancy clipless pedals and shoes which looked a bit out of place under their black jackets and rainbow colored leg warmers.

When they all ran the red light at Fifth and Bellefield, I realized what was going on. This was Critical Mass.

The Critical Mass propaganda is that they organize “events” to “raise awareness” about the relationship, or lack thereof, between cars and bicycles on the road. Mixed into this agenda is some mumbo jumbo about alternative transportation and a lot of self-important twaddle about how bike commuting will save the world. What they do to further their cause is ride in large clumps down the road, ignoring all the prevailing traffic laws and generally crippling whatever traffic corridor they happen to be occupying. Actually, the Pittsburgh crowd was too small to cripple anything, but I’ve seen larger groups in other cities pretty much bring rush hour to a dead stop. In Pittsburgh, they made do with running lights and doing donuts across Fifth Avenue. In other words, Critical Mass is a bunch of cyclists riding like complete morons in order to improve the relationship between bikes and cars on the road. Good luck with that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love bikes. Over the last thirteen years in Pittsburgh, I have ridden my bicycles several thousand miles including a few century rides and light commuting. In my time I’ve had dozens of dogs yap at me through car windows and chase me down roads. I’ve been buzzed by teenagers on Meth. I’ve had fruit thrown at me from the pickup truck of some red-neck moron. I’ve drafted busses and choked on the fumes. In other words, if you are on a bike somewhere in the city, I know what your existence is like.

But, whenever I am in the presence of a Critical Mass event, the only thing that keeps me from rolling the windows down and screaming obscene epithets is young children in the area and my wife hitting me upside the head. I believe that I am as sympathetic a mainstream audience as Critical Mass could possibly hope for, and all I want to do is hurt them. Let me explain.

For decades, John Forester has been preaching the right way to mix cars and bikes in his excellent book, Effective Cycling. Anyone who has more than a passing interest in serious cycling should stop reading this page and go buy this book right now. It should be required reading for cyclists in the same way that the New Testament is required for Christians. Among other things, the book makes the strongest case that I have ever read that the right thing to do is to

1. Treat bicycles as first class vehicular traffic (like motorcycles, say).

2. Have cyclists obey the prevailing local traffic laws.

In the U.S., we seem to be constitutionally incapable of applying these simple principles. On the one hand we have drivers who are convinced that bikes belong only on soul-sucking recreational trails where we would be doomed to ride an endless expanse of crushed limestone at slow speeds, lest we run over the hordes of bladers, joggers and baby strollers who are sharing the space. On the other hand, we have cyclists who are completely ignorant about how to ride in traffic. What they should be doing is riding on the road, in the same direction as the traffic, as far to the right as practical, and following all relevant signs and lights. In other words, no weaving around on the road, no riding between the car lanes, no double pacelines, no jumping lights, no riding on the sidewalk. This doesn’t seem like a lot to ask, but the majority of cyclists that I observe don’t seem to be able to follow these simple rules. Even the cops on mountain bikes ride on the sidewalk.

You would think that members of a cycling advocacy group would try and do better in the hopes of showing the car driving world that they are mature adults that deserve equal standing on the road. Instead, they act just like the infantile assholes on Friday night, blowing through a red light at a busy intersection and then doing donuts across three lanes of traffic. My conclusion is that any hatred that drivers have for bikes is completely justified because the cycling community in general, and Critical Mass in particular, has done nothing to make drivers think that cyclists are anything more than a bunch of juvenile self-centered cry-babies. As long as this image persists, the sick moron who chucked fruit at me in Mars, PA will feel justified in his actions. Therefore, rather than helping me in any way, Critical Mass just makes my life, and the lives of decent cyclists everywhere, harder, and they must be stopped.

In his book, Forester suggests that the reason we discriminate against bicycles in our traffic laws is that we believe bicycles to be toys for children, and thus we don’t expect any more than child-like behavior from the people riding them. Critical Mass certainly lives up to these expectations.

Links

Using Google, I found this guy who agrees with me. So I must be right.

Again, you must buy John Forester’s Effective Cycling. Do it now.

Everyone loves to hate Starbucks.

You can understand why: they’re everywhere, they’re successful, and the experience from store to store is so consistent that they destroy even the pretense of local flavor.

There’s an upside to Starbucks, though: they’re everywhere, they’re succesful, and the experience from store to store is so consistent that I can get a drinkable coffee in the middle of nowhere.

To those of us who live in cities, the idea that one would have to go to a Starbucks to get acceptable coffee is ridiculous. Can’t you just go to a local coffeeshop? How about a diner? Can’t you get good coffee anywhere?

The answer, of course, is: hell no.

I can already see people dashing down to the comments section, prepared to lecture me on how Starbucks coffee is overroasted and burnt and doesn’t provide true satisfaction and yadda yadda yadda, to which all I can say is: sit down, Simone, I’m not finished with my rant yet. You don’t know from bad coffee. You don’t know anything about bad coffee. When I was a kid, I had to walk to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, and when I got there they served me sewer water with Folger’s Crystals waved over it, so I know a thing or two about bad coffee.

The biggest criticism I have of Starbucks on the coffee front is that they are promoting the moronic, disgusting, Seattle-style cappucino. Cappucino is supposed to have a hood that is made from steamed milk mixed with the crema on the coffee. Instead, thanks to Seattle, we get two inches of air-filled foamed milk ladeled on top of our coffee. But it’s every coffee-drinking cretin in Seattle, not just Starbucks, that is responsible for that moral tragedy. And Starbucks has, on the whole, done more good than harm. What sort of good, you ask?

I used to drive the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike about six times a year, going back to about 1986. In 1986, there was no Starbucks. If you wanted coffee, you stopped at a rest stop, where there would be a McDonald’s or some other fast food joint that had a five gallon jug of “Maxwell House” coffee that tasted — and I am simply being as descriptive as possible here, this is not hyperbole — like brewed cardboard. It didn’t taste like coffee, just tannin. If you were lucky, it was only 6 hours old. That was the standard experience. That was as good as you could get when you were in, say, Carlisle, PA and didn’t know anything about the area.

Now, more or less every rest stop along the way has a Starbucks. I can get coffee that, even if it’s not exactly to my taste, tastes like something. So while I understand the various critiques one can make of this huge and growing megacorp, I think it’s important to remember just how goddamn bleak things were in the hinterlands before they arrived.

None of this means that you should go to a Starbucks instead of that cool local coffee shop. If your town has a place as good as La Prima Espresso, and it’s within easy reach, and you go to Starbucks instead, then you’re a fool. But have you noticed how many fools there are out there?

There’s a Starbucks not too far from my office (yes, I realize that in any major American city that’s kind of like saying “today I was breathing air.”) In addition, there are also at least 3 coffee shops within easy walking distance that have nice atmospheres, and coffee that tastes better and is cheaper than Starbucks’. The Starbucks is packed, all the time. Every hour they are open, people are fighting over parking spots, or walking past the other coffee shops on the way so they can get their fix at the Starbucks. Why is that?

It’s tempting to just shrug it off and say “well, they’re all stupid,” but I think it’s a bit more complex than that. I think part of the secret is to realize that Starbucks markets itself (and does it very well) to at least 3 completely different market segments at once.

Start by going in to a Starbucks and looking at the menu on the wall. In every one that I’ve been in recently, you’ll see that it consists of three separate panels, each focusing on a different style of coffee. I call these panels “Giuseppi,” “Joe,” and “Josephine”. The leftmost panel is Giuseppi — it’s all espressos, cappucinos, and other drinks. Students trying to look sophisticated, the artistic type with the Powerbook, they’re all ordering from Giuseppi. Joe, the middle panel, is all variants of plain coffee — “house” coffee, decaf, tea, etc. Commuters on their way to work are all ordering off of Joe. On the rightmost panel, you’ve got Josephine, which I’ll broadly describe as consisting of stupid girly drinks — frappucinos and flavored coffees. Basically, the third panel is for people who don’t really like coffee except in the form of a milkshake. (For some reason, the dreaded “caramel macchiato” ñ if I ever meet the Yuppie loser who misappropriated the name of my beloved tiny spotted coffee and slapped it onto that super-sized monstrosity, I’m going to spit on him ñ is on Giuseppi, presumably because what you call a thing is more important than what a thing actually is.)

Now, your local coffee shop surely has espresso drinks and regular American coffee also, and maybe even a girly drink or two. But what they don’t do is market them towards the different types of customers with the same singleminded intensity as Starbucks. Watch people order from a Starbucks menu. Their eyes aren’t wandering over all their choices. They go straight to the specific menu segment they’re interested in, and then choose from that.

And Starbucks does the little things right, too. Their workflow is smooth and well-architected to deal with high volume. The clerks (I’m trying to avoid calling them “baristas”) smile and aren’t judgmental, even when you order something stupid like a caramel macchiato. There’s overpriced and overportioned pastries of the type that are popular nowadays. If you want to sit there in their comfortable chairs for three hours with your laptop not buying anything, they let you. The lighting is subdued and not harsh. Their bathrooms are clean.

Maybe that’s stuff that you don’t care about. I don’t really care about most of that, either. But apparently, lots of people do. What I think a lot of bitter coffee fanatics don’t understand is that the success of Starbucks isn’t about the coffee. The success of Starbucks is about the company convincing people who weren’t spending $3.50 a day on coffee to make it a part of their daily lives. In the early 1990s, when Starbucks was opening on every corner and driving the weaker local coffee shops out of business, I remember thinking “They can’t keep this up. There just aren’t that many people who go out and buy their coffee at coffee shops.” Starbucks secret is that they weren’t just out to steal consumers from the failing coffee shops, but were working on creating new consumers. In retrospect, they didn’t just steal existing customers. They expanded the market.

In the end, I think that’s why Starbucks is a net benefit to coffee drinkers everywhere. The cost has been that a few local coffee shops that probably weren’t that good anyway were driven out of business (the really good ones have adapted to the competition and have dedicated customers). In return, you can now get a decent cup of joe in the middle of Nowheresville, Kentucky, and the overall level of the United States’ appreciation of coffee as a drink to be enjoyed, rather than simply endured for its medicinal properties, has risen. If you never leave the city, maybe that doesn’t seem like a good trade to you.

But for as long as I still have to drive the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike on occasion, I’ll say it’s worth it.

Additional Resources

• If Starbucks ever drives La Prima out of business, I’ll edit this article and replace it with a rant saying that I always knew they were bastards who are intent on destroying our precious culture.
• The I Hate Starbucks web site, interestingly, seems to largely consist of bitter rants from Starbucks employees.
• Dear fellow travellers at Coffeegeek.com: From this point forward, referring to your Rancilio Silvia as “she” is strictly forbidden, and violators will be punished. No, seriously. You’re really creeping me out. Stop it.

I am pleased to announce that Lidia’s restaurant in the Strip has graciously offered to sponsor the amari tasting. The members of the panel have been chosen, the time and place are set, and all that’s left is to sit down and actually taste the liqueurs, and write up our impressions. Expect pictures and commentary from the event soon.

Thanks to the alert readers who pointed out that the Captcha/security code text box was misnumbered, which made tabbing between the comment fields painful. It’s fixed now.

For the record, here’s my list applying the criteria that psu sets out.

As a special case, as far as I’m concerned, if your menu says “hominy polenta” instead of “grits,” you are automatically placed in the “pretentious / food not great” category.

There are a lot of ways to rate restaurants. The assumption is that most reviewers are there to rate the food, but really they are looking at many other aspects of the place. Therefore, in rating surveys like the Zagat’s, you see multiple numbers written down and averaged and weighted: food, decor, “value” and so on. I was reading a ranty blog entry about a few local places and the thought occured to me to try and define a simple measure to summarize my feelings about a restaurant. Thus, I present to you: the pretention quotient.

Simply put, this quotient is derived by comparing how good the food in a particular place is with how pretentious you perceive a place to be. If you take the ratio of these values, restaurants then naturally fall into four general classes:

Low Pretention, Great Food

Here we have the best ratio of food quality to pretentiousness. These tend to be small places that serve simple regional food that is just too good to pass up. I would eat real barbeque off a picnic table before I’d sit down at most of the fancier tables in Pittsburgh and get served a “flame roasted pork loin with quinoa, baby spinach salad and a cranberry apple demi-glace relish” which ends up being a tasteless piece of white rubber with a red sauce, stale raw spinach with some fake cheese on it and that execrable fad grain that tastes like grass.

Locally, my favorite places hit this sweet spot. La Cucina Flegrea has some of the best Italian food in the city coming out of a place with barely two rooms and a dozen tables, and they let my kid run around near the kitchen while I eat. Similarly, Rose Tea Cafe has simply the best Chinese food in town but is utterly straightforward and lacking in pretense.

High Pretention, Good to Great Food

Of course, we go to fancy places too. The good ones have a quality level is at least as good as their pretentiousness. Locally, Dish and Vivo both aim high and generally hit their targets. Bona Terra is also a nice local place that easily justifies the amount of text they use to describe their food. Casbah is a place whose food exactly matches its pretention level.

Low Pretention, Mediocre Food

Here we have the places that equalize their quality to pretention ratio from the other direction. So they are not great, but they do not try to convince you that they are shooting terribly high. I find these to be tolerable because they basically serve you exactly what they advertise. Locally, a place like Atria and the chain places fall into this part of the matrix. Of course, one prefers to avoid chains if one can help it.

High Pretention, Mediocre to Bad Food

Finally, we get to the places that dominate my bad experiences in restaurants. These are the more up scale stores with big rooms, fancy menus, medium to high prices and completely generic, tasteless, unoriginal food. Here are some things you can do to gain yourself pretention points while not improving your food at all:

Food as Sculpture. Very few people do this well. In general, stacked food is not interesting to look at and is just harder to eat. It’s hard to cut that rubbery pork chop when it’s sitting on top of the cold mashed potatoes.

Weird Tableware. I don’t need forks and knives that weigh eight pounds, or huge plates for small food items, or bowls that are crooked on top. This generally serves no purpose but to distract you from how utterly boring the actual presentation of the food is.

Novel Length Menus. Spare me the biography of every lamb leg you serve, or the trading routes used to obtain the rare olives in your salad. Too often the breathless descriptions of hand picked herbs and organic micro-greens are just an elaborate ruse to make you think the place is not just serving you a plain piece of frozen fish with a white sauce.

Fruity Sauces. You better know what you are doing if you are going to have me put fruit on my meat. Also, you don’t gain my confidence by calling that reduced sauce “saffron jus”.

Snarky Waitrons Dressed in Black. The customer experience is not improved when the pouty waitstaff dressed all in gothic black sneers at me through hip thick rimmed glasses. Also, make sure they can at least pronounce the food.

And, in case you were wondering, local places that I think fall into this class include Davio, where you can spend your whole college fund on pasta in red sauce, and The Church Brew Works which is great when it sticks to beer and pizza, but for some reason needs to convince me that a Grilled Strip Steak served over a roasted garlic orzo cake and topped with a wild mushroom Dunkel sauce is a good idea, when I know it’s just going to be a grilled steak with some stale starch and cold vegetables. I’m sure I could think of a few others, but we’ve avoided them for so long that they escape me.

Summary

Here is a handy table to keep with you to figure out how to classify your own favorite (or not so favorite) places based on how I have classified the places described above (and a few others). Send in your suggestions!

Recently, Thurston Searfoss, author of the superb strategy game The Lost Admiral Returns, dropped me a line. He’s considering adding some features to the game — online play, a scenario editor, more special missions — and wanted my opinion as to which of those features I personally thought, as a gamer, would help with sales. I like Thurston, and I love his game, and so I wrote a detailed response to his questions. After sending it, I decided it made interesting reading on it’s own, and Thurston graciously said he wouldn’t mind if I posted it here.

Dear Thurston,

Thanks for your mail. Let me make sure I understand your question. You began by asking me “which of these three features (more bonus/different types of missions, a scenario editor, or online (hot seat) play) will draw people deeper into the game” but you ended up asking “which of these additional features will help improve sales of my game?” I think the latter question is actually a better one. So that’s the one I’m going to focus on.

One of the web sites I read regularly is Ron Gilbert’s grumpygamer.com. Ron was the creator of the Monkey Island games. What Ron said, recently, was that distribution really isn’t the stumbling block in selling games. Marketing is. Marketing is what turns “this game is downloadable on the internet” into “this game is being bought by lots of people on the internet.” (or “this game is on store shelves” into “this game is flying off store shelves.”) I don’t know a lot about marketing, but I know a little. My understanding of the discipline is that the rough flow is: (1) identify a target market, (2) craft a message that reaches that market that (3) convinces them that they need your product. To some extent, I see you taking what I think of a hacker’s perspective towards the sales of your game. It’s very analytical. “I’d like to sell more units. What technical features can I add to the game that will make it even more irresistable to my potential market?”

The problem I see is that in order for those features to make a difference, the people who care about those features need to hear about your game. Right now, I’m not convinced they are. So, without being flip at all, my gut instinct is that the best thing you could do to increase sales would not be to do more product development, but figure out how to better market the product you have.

But let’s assume that you’ve already got someone thinking about those issues, and you want to do as much as you can on the product side to expand the target market. So let’s talk about that.

I think we can eliminate “additional missions and content” from consideration. It really isn’t a draw. Lost Admiral Returns already has a ton of different types of missions, and I can’t see anyone saying “Whoah, there are 14 special missions, not 9 — I’m in!” As someone who favors single-player play over online, mostly what you want to know is that there is some degree of complexity. Above a certain point, more than “enough” is just gravy. So in terms of attracting more people to buy, I think this would probably not be time well spent. This is probably also the easiest to implement, so I realize it’s a shame to say that it won’t expand the pool of potential buyers. But I think that’s the truth.

That leaves us with online play and a scenario editor. These have similarities in their effect on the customer base, but also some differences in terms of ongoing support.

I’m going to eliminate discussion of the technical aspect of these. Obviously there are technical challenges to making online play work well, and you are going to have to tackle them if you do it. Instead, I’m just focusing on “will it help make people buy your game?”

One thing that these features have in common is they have the potential to create evangelists for the game, although for different reasons. Online players are evangelists because they need to make sure there are other people to play against. Scenario builders are evangelists because they want to garner accolades and appreciation for their design talent. It’s clear that both of these features can help create evangelists. You can look at Neverwinter Nights, which is really just a decent 3d engine wrapped around a vaguely OK set of D&D rules for an example of this. It ships with both online play and a scenario builder, and a quick look at user-created scenario archives like the Neverwinter Vault shows that people really have swarmed all over both aspects (although to be fair, I’ll point out that the marketing behind the game was brilliant, aggressive, and ubiquitous — you couldn’t open a web browser in 2002 without reading about NWN.)

My instinct about the tradeoffs between the two (assuming they are both implemented perfectly, etc) are as follows: a scenario editor creates more aggressive evangelists (because they want to “publicize” their work), but far fewer of them, because the cost of entry (”sit down, learn to use the scenario editor, and design a scenario”) is fairly high. Online play will create less aggressive evangelists, because lots of games support online play, but more of them. Hell, I got Madden ‘05 just because psu wanted to play me online.

There are also compatibility and upgrade issues. No one really expects to be able to play LAR 2 online without buying it, but everyone who develops scenarios for LAR will be bitter if they don’t import perfectly into LAR2 (maybe it’s too early to be talking about a sequel, but it’s worth thinking about). I also think that online play will give you more insight into the needs of your players. Eventually, you’ll have to start thinking about the next product, and the online users are going to give you more feedback than the single-player users, by their very nature.

So between the two features — online play and a scenario editor — “all things being equal” I’d say go for online play. And if you want the get the scenario editor for free, tell people that you won’t be mad at them if they reverse-engineer your file format.

The one thing about online play that concerns me is whether people would find “hot seat” play intolerable. What does a player do when it’s not their turn? I worry that the hotseat experience won’t be a compelling experience unless you come up with a good answer to this question. No one wants to stare at a “the other player is making his moves” status screen for 10 minutes. One suggestion a friend of mine made was “online co-op play”. Two (or more?) allied players enter moves to a disjoint set of ships at the same time, all playing against a computer opponent (presumably being hosted by one player’s machine). when they’re all done, combat resolves and displays for all of them. Combine this with a decent chat interface and you’d have something compelling and, I think, unique.

But: right now, based on what I see on the Internet, I’d bet that the universe of people playing your game — including people who are just evaluating, not buying — is way too small. You know better than I do what your numbers are. Let’s say you’ve only got a 1% conversion rate on “people who download the demo” into “people who pay for the full game.” Adding a whole new feature to the game to try to bump up that number is indeed a viable strategy, but I think you should ask yourself whether there are viable (or cheaper) paths to simply get the demo into the hands of more people instead, and increase sales that way.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the issue. I hope you find them helpful.

Kind Regards,

peterb

Additional Resources

This month the Official Xbox Magazine included a demo of Jade Empire, the upcoming RPG that Bioware has been developing since they passed the KOTOR franchise to others. I mention this because for the last year or so I’ve had the following conversation with Pete a few times:

Me: This Jade Empire looks cool, but I don’t know about this “real time” fighting system.

Pete: Don’t worry, this is Bioware. Every game they ever made has a battle system that is turn based underneath but animated in real time. I will bet a case of beer that exactly the same dice rolling is going on behind all those kung fu animations.

Me: Well, I guess you know more about this than me, but those gameplay movies really look like a fighting game to me.

Pete: Nah, it’ll never happen.

After playing the demo, Pete came to me this morning and said “I might have been wrong. It really is real time, and it’s like a fighting game, only no fun.” I could only reply, “Yeah, but at least they tried something different.”

These days, trying something different is as thankless a risk as one can take. Whether you develop consumer software, games, or just the interfaces to every day devices, you stand to alienate everyone who currently loves you by making even small changes to how the user operates your product. The world is full of users disgruntled by arbitrary and gratuitous changes to tools that already met all their expectations. Consider:

1. In the 1990s, modern electronic cameras evolved interfaces that were very fast to use, still provided total control over focus and exposure and only used three easy to reach dials. Of course, disgruntled old timers never figured out how these interfaces were better and continued to pine for cameras with tiny hard to reach dials on the top of the camera. A lot of people still think that the Leica film loading system is a great idea.

2. Every major update to the Mac user interface brings howls of outrage from the hard core contingent. Dozens of times now, the Mac faithful have declared that Apple has lost its way, and that they should just bring back the Classic interface from System 7 or whatever, which represented the Platonic ideal for graphical desktop user interfaces. Google for “the spatial finder” to see what I mean.

3. Getting back to the gaming context, one recent game which was excellent on many levels but derided by the hard core fans was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Why did people make fun of this game? Was the design flawed? The story too short? The gameplay awkward? No. This game was hated because it was cell shaded, and to use the modern vernacular, a lot of people thought this was gay. Why did they think this? Because they wanted it to look like the old game, only with higher resolution textures.

What all this points to is the fact that the opinions of the installed base of users is a major factor behind the relative lack of innovation in user interfaces. Innovation is rare because users do not want it. No matter what users say, what they want is interfaces that work in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Which brings me back to my original story.

Pete and I both found the Jade Empire demo disappointing, because what we were hoping for was KOTOR but with Kung Fu. That is, we didn’t really want Bioware to innovate in any way. We would have been most happy if they had just done the same game they have been doing for a decade, and pasted a new Kung Fu skin on it. We might bitch and moan about how no one makes innovative games anymore, and how everything is just a recycled franchise, but the truth is that this is what we want. We don’t want exciting new gameplay. We want the gameplay that we know and love so that we can have another 40 or 60 hours of bliss on the console beating stuff up and increasing R. We want this in the same way that grizzled old Unix hackers still cling to Emacs key bindings, focus follows mouse and X11 style middle button paste, while most of the rest of the world has moved on.

This is why truly new interface mechanics rarely gain a wide following, while interfaces from existing and widely used applications live on forever. Users in general will inherently prefer awkward interfaces that they are familiar with to new interfaces that are unknown, unless the new way is incontrovertibly superior, which it usually is not. This is true for games as well, and as a result, most long running game franchises clutch on to their archaic conventions and gameplay like zombies to live brains. Whenever you are playing the license tests in GT4, or backtracking through an entire level to pick up a critical item that you missed, or find money in a plant in Zelda, or fight the ludicrous top down camera angles in Metal Gear Solid then just remember that it’s like that because someone wants it that way. The next time you are watching the 30 second animated unskippable game-over scene for the fifteenth time because the current boss is too hard, you can thank the existing user base for your misery, because those are the people that would be complaining if the scene and/or the boss were taken out of the game.

The good news is that even though things change slowly, they do change. Every year more gamers enter the pool and force us to reconsider whether or not our beloved conventions make sense. Over time, this has the effect of improving things for everyone even if the hard core fanboys sometimes deride it as “selling out” or “dumbing down” the games. I haven’t seen too many unskippable cut scenes, or annoying, drawn out game-over screens lately. Even the cameras in third person games are improving. This makes me uncharacteristically optimistic about the future. I’m even hopeful that Bioware figured out a way to make a real time combat system fun, rather than just button mashing.

Until then, I’ve got some Team Slayer to play after I kill some more Sith.