I-81 – You get what you pay for

I recently spent several years avoiding TSA scans and gropes (which I believe we will find out will cause cancer for some of us, besides being unhealthy for our Bill of Rights), by boycotting air travel for any trip that could be done in a drive of 2 days or less. One of the main arteries for getting out of the DC metropolitan area, particularly for points south and west, is Interstate 81, which runs a little less than 2 hours west of DC down through Virginia to Knoxville and beyond, with connections to other highways that go to North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia and states beyond.

It’s easy to stay in a motel on the interstate for under $50. In Tennessee roadside ads (which are plentiful in Tennessee but appear to be heavily restricted in Virginia – though Virginia has an abundance of state trooper ticket traps, and Tennessee virtually none) they claim you can stay in a motel for $29 if you search hard. But you get what you pay for.

I have stayed in a variety on several trips, from $45 to $79. Curiously everyone has cable TV usually including HBO, and cleanliness is unaffected by price. (I have found dust on the slats in vents and abandoned stripper wear under the bed in places in different states, including several hundred dollar a night beach front Delaware joints.) My only, and very painful and long lasting, attack by what I think were bed bugs, did occur in 2010 after a trip down I81 where I stayed in the cheapest motels.

There are some things you just expect if you are spending less than $50 or $60 a night. The wifi will not exist, or will stop working, or will only be in the lobby or in the room closest to the lobby (ask for it?) even if available wifi was advertised. Windows and doors will leak, and if you are near them you will feel cold drafts. The promised continental breakfast will not include eggs or meat or any artisanal baked goods. If you are lucky there will be that funny flippable waffle iron and you can make your own waffle.

At most Interstate gas station you can get a free magazine format coupon book with maps and locations of motels with some pricing and amenities information, and discount coupons.  Promised amenities, particularly WiFi, may not actually be available.

Paula Deen may soon reveal she has Type 2 diabetes

Paula Deen may soon reveal she has Type 2 diabetes

Pitango’s Edenic Gelato

The Biblical Noah lived in a simpler, fresher world than ours, before there was religious conflict, before there were even Jews or Christians, back when G-d gave only 7 commandments, not 10 (or 613), and when the whole ball of wax had just been washed clean by the Flood.

Today his namesake, Noah Dan, gives us a fresher, simpler gelato, which most customers agree taste divine. No preservatives or emulsifiers, most batches flavored with only one (non-forbidden) fruit, including quince and other rare produce.

Noah Dan

I invoke the biblical imagery for a reason, because Noah is a farm boy, though the farm he was raised on was a kibbutz where he was raised by an Israeli father and an Italian mother. And he procures his free range eggs and unpasteurized milk and cream from grass fed cows from Mennonite farms in Pennsylvania. It’s a gelato produced by a coalition of, if not chosen people, very selectively chosen ingredients.

pitango cherries

“Pitango” is the name of a wild, bitter cherry native to Israel. It’s not actually a flavor on the menu. Noah has opened stores in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood, in Reston, Virginia, and in DC on Capitol Hill beside Eastern Market and in Logan Circle across from the Whole Foods. Besides about 20 flavors (that vary weekly, but which do always include chocolates), there are also beverages made from gelato with a shot of espresso.  It’s expensive like other artisanal ice creams and sorbets.  They serve it in small cups with very teeny spoons so you can’t gulp it down and you don’t realize that the portions weren’t big.

WiFi:  The Logan Circle store has no wifi.

Starbucks Blonde roast

For all the people who have long thought Starbucks burns its beans and produces dreck that is basically like drinking used motor oil, Starbucks used to say “tough luck.”  You could get an Americano or some adulterated latte or frappuccino to cover the taste.

Then McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts and Kripsy Kreme and Illy’s and Bread and Chocolate and everyone else started offering espresso and cappuccino and free WiFi.

And Starbucks decided to offer a medium roast and a lightly roasted “Blonde” coffee, which it rolled out this month.  Yesterday some Starbucks were offering sample shots, followed by a free mini-packet of the coffee blend you liked best to take home.

Illy’s, Dunkin and Krispy are still better.

Free Coffeeshop WiFi may face extinction — the tragedy of the commons

Free WiFi, which some patrons use all day for the price of a cup of coffee, may be facing extinction.  The overuse of an unowned and unfenced resource, from air or water to tuna, is called “the tragedy of the commons.”  A good discussion of the economics of this can be found here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html

WiFi Backlash Continues With New Filter Coffee in Foggy Bottom

Posted by Lydia DePillis @Washington City Paper

Coffee, hold the wifi.

If you’ve been to Filter, the tiny craft coffee place tucked away on 20th Street north of Dupont Circle that’s apparently the best in the city, you probably haven’t been able to find a seat, it’s that full of people tapping away on their laptops. Its new location in Foggy Bottom, scheduled to open in April at 1919 Pennsylvania Avenue NW (but behind the building, on I Street between 19th and 20th), will have—brace yourself—no wireless Internet.
Other coffeeshops have started to turn off the WiFi on weekends in order to dissuade the laptopping squatters (UPDATE, Saturday, 7:30 a.m. – Peregrine Coffee’s new 14th Street location has also never had wireless). But Filter’s owner Rasheed Jabr says he’s going cold turkey with the new location, which will be only slightly larger than his current one.
“I would like to have the space for people to come sit, chat, have a cup of coffee whenever they want to, rather than a sea of laptops,” Jabr says, noting that he’s catering more to Foggy Bottom’s international crowd than its students. “I promote conversation and reading because those are good things. I’d rather people walk into my coffeeshop and see that it’s busy because it’s busy, rather that it’s busy because people have been sitting in front of their laptop for three hours.”
Of course, people may still hang around and read textbooks for three hours. But the folks who are attracted to WiFi like a plant is to sunlight will have to find it somewhere else.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Brasserie Beck (Washington, D.C.)

On the K Street corridor near the Convention Center, Chinatown, the Cato Institute and points downtown, Brasserie Beck features an encyclopedic European beer menu and a menu that goes well with drinking beer and wine, from oysters on the half shell to hearty continental dishes.

I’ve dined there from time to time alone and with others, and only once did I have something badly done, weirdly wiener schnitzel, which was dry and somewhat flavorless.

The wait staff are very attentive, except at the bar, where the main bartender, who used to work at the old Johnny’s Half Shell in Dupont Circle (before it relocated to Capitol Hill), is great, but the others may leave you with drink and no food forever.

WiFi:  Beck’s has good and free wifi.

Kramerbooks & Afterwards: Goats will eat anything — but will you?

Kramerbooks & Afterwards is a decades old destination for brunchers, readers, and blind daters in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle.  It’s actually as close to the Dupont Circle metro (subway) stop as you can get, at 19th and Q Streets NW, almost on the circle itself.

I ignored it for years, treating it as a bookstore alone, and not a restaurant and bar (and coffee spot too).

Then one day I asked a client from Manhattan who had moved to DC where he liked to eat in the neighborhood. (A common ritual in DC is for former New Yorkers to tell other DC residents about the tragedy of their forced relocation to our hick town, which has no art, culture, or food good enough for them.) Surprisingly he picked Kramerbooks and Afterwards.  I went with him that week and had a delicious pasta dish and I was sold.

Since then I have mainly gone for breakfast and brunch and from time to time for a beer at the bar.  The brunch features a variety of omelets, grits and ham, bagel and lox, and other choices, all served with a small plate of tiny breakfast breads and orange juice.  And after 10 am (because it’s DC’s blue law), a complimentary mimosa.

So today I decided to stop in and have lunch at Kramers.  I was pleased to see goat on the menu, a Caribbean goat dish on beans and rice with a side of diced mango.  I actually saw a dish of it before I was seated, and it looked good.

However…

It was way, way too spicy, which neither the menu nor the waiter informed me about.  And it was full of bones, which I only discovered when I put it into my mouth (full of expensive dentistry I cannot easily afford to pay for a second time).  Here’s a picture of the bones:

So not a bad place to eat, though one definitely has to be wary.

WiFi:  Though it is near one of the three Dupont Circle Starbucks, it does not pick up any of their AT&T signals.  Kramerbooks does not have its own wifi.  The signal from the Dupont Hotel across 19th street, which is free with registration, does reach tables closest to the sidewalk well enough to get something done.

The Bell Buckle Cafe

Bell Buckle, Tennessee is a small hamlet of 200 or so souls, located on a railroad track that was once a train depot.  It’s home to the oldest private preparatory school in the South, The Webb School, founded by Sawney Webb (who then went on to found another Webb School in California).  When school is in session the population doubles (the school is both a day school for students from surrounding counties and a boarding school for students from other states).

The name of the town supposedly is derived from the Cherokee hieroglyphics for “Danger!  White people nearby!”  Namely depictions of a cow bell and a belt buckle carved into a tree’s bark.

Recently the pre-Depression store front strip on the main street in Bell Buckle has been gentrified into a row of coffee shops and antique and tchotchke stores.  And in the midst of it is the Bell Buckle Cafe.

I have eaten in allegedly southern or soul food diners in several cities, most recently Washington, D.C. and Nashville.  Only the Bell Buckle Cafe comes close to family cooking from decades ago (reviewers l-o-v-e it on Yelp).  The menu includes a large selection of such southern delicacies as hoe cakes and collard greens, along with beets, green beans, pork chops, fried chicken, and more familiar fare.  Its always very, very full at lunch, as the antique stores attract people from around Tennessee and other states (Bell Buckle is less than 20 miles from a university town, Murfreesboro, and I-24, which runs from Nashville to Chattanooga.)

16 Railroad Sq

Bell Buckle, TN 37020

(931) 389-9693

WiFi:  Untested by me, though I will attempt to remedy that in 2012.