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Greetings from Carrboro, She drove a Plymouth. This was the 70’s, so not a small car; you could easily park a Prius in the back seat. It was brown, smelled of breath mints and had a sun-faded box of Kleenex on the package shelf beneath the rear window. All that is obviously rather unremarkable. The intriguing part […]

Generally, I’m a wee suspicious of pithy sayings. As a veteran of the restaurant world, I have ample proof that the customer is not always right and that, in fact, a watched pot will boil. Every single time. So, when anyone rhetorically conjures the legendary epithet “luck of the Irish” I have similar doubts. Maybe it’s me, but history […]

Greetings from Carrboro, I have to admit that I was underwhelmed. To be honest, I was probably hoping for a bit too much. Because after reading in Mad Magazine that my Irish heritage pegged me as most likely to marry a relative without teeth, the big reveal of the family crest was ripe for disappointment. […]

Clearly, there are two trains of thought. Either the calendar gods felt sorry for poor, short-changed February and gave it the extra quadrennial day or – my guess – they were decidedly misanthropic and felt that adding an April 31st or June 31st would just provide too much of a good thing to all of […]

Greetings from Carrboro, The general rule is one size fits most. Occasionally a restaurant will offer two different pour sizes for a glass of the same wine. Or a bar will offer what’s called a “short” beer. But by and large people don’t drink various sized cocktails. At least in a public setting. There have […]

Greetings from Carrboro, I’ve been known to rant. Thankfully, this is mostly when I’m alone in my car. If it shows up at work there’s usually someone to remind me that I should tuck the crazy part back in. And my daughters have a specific glare that wordlessly does the same thing. Drivers can be […]

Greetings from Carrboro, She asked for our order a good 40 seconds after we sat down. Maybe less. We’d been waiting in line for a good half hour outside the restaurant serenaded by the afternoon traffic and an ancient speaker tuned to some dreadful AM station. The waitress was older than me and straight out […]

Greetings from Carrboro, This month, Acme will turn 26. And if you’re counting in restaurant years, that’s a lot. But measuring the life of a restaurant with a calendar only tells a bit of the story. There are the many hundreds of employees. The million+ guests. The untold tons – tons! – of potatoes, of flour, of butter and […]

Greetings from Carrboro, The Uber driver was concerned. The streets were tearing up her minivan and the people, well, the people were crazy. She’d only been in New Orleans for a month. This had to have been either October or November. And the minivan was recently outfitted with a plexiglass shield that isolated her from […]