SaltShaker

 Everyone’s a pacifist between wars. It’s like being a vegetarian between meals.”
- Colman McCarthy, journalist, activist
I was vegetarian once upon a time. It wasn’t for a long period. I was dating someone who was, wasn’t working in a restaurant at that moment, and it seemed to be a good move at the time. Two days [...]

 If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”
- Henry David Thoreau
Really, disappointing is not the correct word, as in order to be disappointed, you must have had a level of expectation which exceeded the outcome. And, in the case of these two mini-reviews, I had no particular expectations [...]

 Ambivalence dominates the Argentines’ self-identity. Depending on the political climate of the times and the dominant ideological orientations, residents of this country oscillate between an identity stressing commonalities with other Latin-American nations; a shared history of four centuries of Spanish rule; and an identity highlighting the uniqueness of this nation, an alleged Europeanized cosmopolitan national [...]

 Huarique: Lugar poco conocido donde se puede comer y beber a bajo precio.”
“Hole-in-the wall”
For many years, until the cuisine, and in particular, the banh mi sandwiches, became all the rage, those in the know in NYC knew that the best of those sandwiches, not to mention amazingly good, home-cooked Vietnamese dishes of other sorts, were [...]

 Another factor that renders Peru exceptional: The unusual is commonplace.”
- Fabiola Santiago, Miami Herald
It’s really not news around here, or probably in any hot culinary landscape, Peruvian cuisine, and in particular modern, fusion, or nueva andina, are all the rage. For some time now I’ve been hearing about a hotspot of the genre in Palermo, [...]

 Harold: I want 30 sliders, 5 french fries, and 4 large cherry cokes.
Kumar: I want the same except make mine diet cokes.
- from Harold & Kumar go to White Castle
While White Castle may not have invented the hamburger, and in fact that tasty treat’s origins are a matter of some dispute, there are a couple [...]

 Every few thousand years some shepherd inhales smoke from a burning bush and has a vision or eats moldy rye bread in a cave and sees God.”
- Kerry Thornley, co-founder of Discordianism
I stand corrected, or rather sit. You see, I made fun of the claim of Boedo’s Café Margot that the turkey sandwich was invented [...]

 Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.”
- E.M. Forster, author
A recent bout with the vagaries of Argentine supply and demand led me far afield. It was the sort of thing that would simply not have occurred to [...]