Friday, May 13, 2011.
Three Hundred Restaurants. My Time Machine.
A subscriber emailed last week wondering where my list of top 100 restaurants was. I was proud to tell him that I had a Top 200. But I couldn't quite remember where it was, so I looked for it. I found that it was almost two years old. That shamed me into revising the list, a process I thought I could finish today.
I couldn't. My first pass through the database proved that 200 was not enough restaurants to capture all the noteworthy ones. The second time though I shot for 250. Still not enough. It had to be 300.
I had never made a top-300 restaurants list. In fact, no book or website or newspaper here has ever published a rated, ranked, and reviewed guide to 300 restaurants.
If there's been an advantage in being mostly homebound since of my Mardi Gras injury, it's that it's allowed me to get a lot of work done. The job would take the entire weekend and some of Monday next week. And I fell behind on other projects. But now I've reached a new high-water mark.
But I wonder if anyone cares about the difefrence between the 236th best and the 298th best restaurants. I have a habit of giving too much information to people who ask me questions. I think I may have done that here.
I took a break from that job to celebrate the forty-fourth anniversary of the Jesuit Junior-Senior Prom. Nothing went my way back then, and the prom didn't, either. (I was cancelled at the last minute by a girl who said she really had to wash her hair.) However, what I did instead of going to the prom was so meaningful that I can still recall every moment of it. It was the night I became a man.
Unfortunately, the story isn't as interesting as that sounds. I drove around town listening to the radio all night, while performing the mental equivalent of a cicada digging up from underground and popping out of his old, wingless skin. That's why I note the anniversary every year by revisiting some places I went that night. I can't do it this year--I'm still prohibited from driving by the doctor. So for an hour I traveled my 1967 path virtually, and wound up with a Mapquest version of it. During that hour, I became sixteen again. Happens every year.
It has been over three years since a day was missed in the Dining Diary. To browse through all of the entries since 2008, go here.
