Week @ Acme 2/16
2/16 Greetings from Carrboro, Internships are nothing new in restaurants. You’ve seen Ratatouille, right? Nowadays, all the cool people say stage (pronounced staj) to make their apprenticeships sound fancy. Face it: there’s nothing quite like a French-sounding word to make the culinary world genuflect. And, honestly, what would you choose to order from a [...]
Weekend @ Acme 1/20
1/20 Greetings from Carrboro, Lord, the faces I must have made. Year after year. Every single time that I tried one. For my father, the whole thing was a time-honored rite of passage. He was sure the path to manhood was paved with polishing shoes, holding doors for women, and eating oysters on [...]
Week @ Acme 1/5
1/5/12 Greetings from Carrboro, There’s nothing quite like a looming apocalypse to quash ambitious New Year’s resolutions. I’m not sure if this end-of-days involves volcanoes, flaming meteors and general geological mayhem or if this is the type where the chosen get whooshed naked to paradise leaving the rest of the clothed masses [...]
Week @ Acme 1/5
1/5/12 Greetings from Carrboro, There’s nothing quite like a looming apocalypse to quash ambitious New Year’s resolutions. I’m not sure if this end-of-days involves volcanoes, flaming meteors and general geological mayhem or if this is the type where the chosen get whooshed naked to paradise leaving the rest of the clothed masses to feel [...]
Week at Acme 12/20
12/20 Greetings from Carrboro, I really hadn’t planned to buy my mother water skis. Or that zebra print nose-hair trimmer. Because I realize now, as presents go, they don’t really say “Merry Christmas” as much as “your son needs serious therapy. Again.” Which is not such a heartwarming yuletide meditation. But they were [...]
Weekend @ Acme 12/6 & Champagne DInner 12/19
12/6 Greetings from Carrboro, It really doesn’t make any sense. At all. Look at the rest of the world. France has Champagne and crémant. Spain has cava. And Italy has prosecco. Sounds lovely, right? And classy. Festive, even. So what did the great American marketing machine contrive for our bubbly drinking pleasure? Cold [...]
Weekend @ Acme and Champagne Dinner 12/19
12/6 Greetings from Carrboro, It really doesn’t make any sense. At all. Look at the rest of the world. France has Champagne and crémant. Spain has cava. And Italy has prosecco. Sounds lovely, right? And classy. Festive, even. So what did the great American marketing machine contrive for our bubbly drinking pleasure? Cold Duck. [...]
Week @ Acme 11/22
11/22 Greetings from Carrboro, There was a time in my life when a certain unavoidable contingency embraced “Gobble, Gobble” as an appropriate Thanksgiving greeting. This was deemed the holiday bookend to that ever popular Christmas shout out “Merry, Merry.” Both were spoken with a rather nauseating peppiness that’s usually the domain of local [...]
Week @ Acme 11/15
11/15 Greetings from Carrboro, I’m pretty sure that it absolutely ends tonight. OK, I know. I know. Never say never. But serving dinner on the patio in November is always iffy. Much less this late into the month. It’s just too cold. The chairs outside are soon stacked and put away. Mulch [...]
Week @ Acme 11/11 and Bordeaux Wine Dinner
11/11/11 Greetings from Carrboro, We were suckers back then. At least, I like to imagine it wasn’t only me who swallowed their spiel – hook, line, and sinker. Either way, those salesmen could smell the earnest naiveté on me and would lay it on thick. They wore golf shirts and tassel loafers [...]
