“Some may try and tell us that this is the end of an era. But what they overlook is that in America, every day is a new beginning, and every sunset is merely the latest milestone on a voyage that never ends. For this is the land that has never become, but is always in the act of becoming. Emerson was right: America is the land of tomorrow.

– Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the U.S.

Buenos Aires – The party was a success. Lots of guests, more than I knew, or imagined were coming. A few who couldn’t make it at last minute. Fun gifts. Wine, champagne, pizzas (my “Chicago style”, of course), empanadas (spicy bbq, squash & green onion), chips and dip, the ubiquitous crudité (which people actually finished off, who knew?), and ceviche. Quite the combo, no? I leave the rest in the hands of captioned photos – a picture being worth, and all that…

Amy (in from Boston) and Adam (in from San Jose)

Me chatting away, Kevin (local restaurant owner) looking on

Henry’s niece Jheny, sister Silvia, niece Viviana, who wouldn’t leave the kitchen to mingle until I threatened to send them back to La Plata for the night…

On the outsides, Adriana and Eduardo (in from Uruguay), Elizabeth (now 7 months pregnant), and Juan (both local)

Diego, Nestor, and Martha, all local

Henry with friends Lucho, Jorge, and Damian, all in from La Plata

Kevin, Mike, Bettye, Allan, Martha and Barbara – all local friends

Wow… Adam (San Jose), Brian (Seattle), Bob (Brooklyn), James (Prague), Lucho and Jorge (La Plata), Hernan (local)

Henry entering, singing, with my birthday cake (spiced chocolate, chocolate ganache frosting, toasted coconut, lots of candles, though thankfully, not 50 of them)

Ready to blow out the candles, whenever they finish singing…

The cake, plus a chocolate strawberry cheesecake and a vanilla orange cheesecake – all reduced to crumbs within five minutes

I’ve been saving this three liter bottle of sparkling just for this occasion! Lots of trouble getting the cork out – took five of us taking turns!

And, in case you were wondering, it’s a bottle of 1998 Iron Horse Vineyards “Good Luck Cuvee” – thanks go out to friend and winery owner Joy Sterling, who gave it to me years ago, though didn’t know I’d save it for this event.

Opening presents…

…there were lots of them!

In bed by 1:30, a good night’s sleep, and… on with the next 50!

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

– Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Buenos Aires – I have had a growing sense of inquietude in regard to my personal world of readin’, ritin’, an’ rithmetic’. It’s something that I’ve been noticing for the past several months, with creepily growing awareness. All of it seems to be heading towards superficiality, towards sound-bytes, towards, well, the direction that web-surfing takes us.

A few years ago, despite holding down a full-time restaurant job, and in New York that meant 12-14 hours a day, 6 days a week, I still managed to have a social life, read anywhere from 50-75 books a year, catch a little television – generally just a favorite show or two, participate in a bit of online gaming, get in regular exercise, and write a relatively steady number of articles each month on various topics. Setting aside the online gaming, which, if anything, I’ve decreased the amount of, I probably spent an hour a day on the internet. Even when I first started this blog, it probably stayed at not much over that.

Today, with part-time work, I have, it sometimes seems, less of a social life – certainly a smaller circle of friends that I do things with, I realized that over the last three years here, until a recent intentional shift in my reading habits, I had probably not read 20 books, almost no time in front of the television – but here’s the kicker, I found myself downloading or renting the discs of television series that I’d never seen and just had a whim to see (during the last three years I’ve seen the entire series: 24, The West Wing, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Firefly (okay, that was worth it), Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, Kung Fu, Reilly: Ace of Spies, Alias, Numb3rs, Picket Fences and more movies and individual shows than I care to think about) all in front of my computer screen – a place I seem to be for anywhere from 6-8 hours on many a day. My exercise has dropped to nil, that’s the first thing that’s going to change, and I’ve noticed two trends in my writing that, while not alarming, merit some looking at.

The first is the article writing. I have less control over this one – it’s a change in the medium. While previously it was common to get an assignment with a month or more lead time to write an article of anywhere from 1-2000 words, or at least a standard 750-800 word one-page magazine column, the requests these days come in with less than a week until deadline, sometimes only a day or two, and seem to be for “feature” articles that don’t top 5-600 words, columns that only take half a page due to advertising, i.e.,, under 400 words, and perhaps alarmingly, those magazines that have an online presence have started asking for 30 second to 1 minute video summations that cover a topic to which before they would have devoted 3-4 pages of the magazine. Even venerable institutions like The New York Times (which I haven’t written for) started, a few years ago, having the restaurant critic record a 30-second video to highlight the key points of his restaurant reviews so that people didn’t have to read through the whole column. It’s the way of the world – sound bytes and attention deficit are in – verbosity, accuracy, and detail are out. A quick, witty opinion seems to matter more than a well-thought out, reasoned and engrossing piece.

The second relates to this blog, and here I do have some say. I can look back at when I first started it – I tended to write longer posts, often going off on tangents, exploring various subjects on ingredients or dishes that I found as I explored my new home here in Argentina. Critical, and if I may say so myself, sometimes witty looks at restaurants, or social mores, or government services were all fair game. And then the criticism started. I’d get e-mails from friends or family members telling me that while they were interested in what I was doing, they simply didn’t have the time in their day to spend reading one of my posts (I think the longest post I probably ever wrote wouldn’t take an average reader more than five minutes to read). I was accused of excessive verbosity, of not getting to the point, of, bluntly, going beyond my allotted sound-byte. I even recently had an exchange via e-mail with a regular reader who wrote me a couple of notes to inform me that my tendency to include information extraneous to restaurant reviews, such as descriptions of neighborhoods, comments about my life or why I happened to be engaged in one thing or another, or, simply, anything that wasn’t a direct note about the quality of the food and service in one restaurant or another, was exasperating for him because he actually had to read the post to find out what I thought about the restaurant – not to mention that sometimes my posts weren’t even about restaurants! I pointed out that this was never intended to be a restaurant review website. I don’t think that sat well with him. Hell, these are the same people who take the time to write me e-mails asking me for information on one subject or another, on a particular restaurant, or on my recommendations – generally stuff that’s already on the site, indexed over there in the right-hand column, or easily found by using the search feature over there as well – and expect me to spend the time giving them a personalized, detailed answer.

So here’s where things change. I’ve noticed that too many of my posts have become, without conscious intent, nothing more than simple fact reporting. Minimal detail, just the facts ma’am, in a word… at least for me… boring. And it’s apparent in my personal interest in the blog – I used to eagerly wake up ready to write about the previous day’s adventures while I sipped my morning coffee – now I find myself putting off writing, and then scrambling to write quick, lackluster pieces, just so no one thinks I went and disappeared. (I find that if I don’t post for about 48 hours I start getting irate and sometimes even threatening notes from people about how I’m depriving them.)

You heard it here first, not like you’d likely hear it anywhere else. I’m going back to writing, not noting. It’ll probably take me a little bit to get back in the swing of things, and it may mean, for a little while, fewer posts. But, hopefully, more in-depth, interesting and engaging posts that might actually provide some insight into the world around me rather than a list of ingredients that went into last night’s soup.

“It’s a queer thing is a man’s soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known.”

– D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Buenos Aires – As noted about a week and a half ago, I expect(ed) a few more interviews about Casa SaltShaker to be popping up in one media form or another. This morning’s La Nación, one of the two major daily papers here, led off with theirs. Interestingly, they took a new tack – for once not spouting off about the amazing new phenomenon that is the restaurant de puertas cerradas, something I’ve been trying to get across to people for awhile now – they’ve been around, you know? No, instead, they delved into the strange world, at least as far as the writer was concerned, of “forcing people to share tables with people they don’t know”… more or less in those words. She wasn’t particularly critical, it’s not like she said “this is a horrible thing and we must put a stop to it”. She simply discussed how unusual it is in local culture to share tables with people you don’t know, in a public setting – something that the writer seemed to think is common in Paris and Rome. I don’t recall much of it in either place, but so be it. We were the focus of the article, though two other places (one left un-named) were also mentioned. Not surprising, since indeed, it really is not local custom.

Once again the radio stations jumped in – one calling at 7:30 this morning, waking us up, and asking me to jump into an interview on-air. I groggily declined and went back to bed. Another called a few hours later, but the connection was so bad I was getting only about 2/3 of the words – and they threw me directly on the air with pretty much no warning – I suppose I could have hung up on the DJs, but they were already introducing me when I was connected through, so I stuck it out. It was only two minutes, with both of them talking over each other and me, topping off the bad connection, so I have little idea how I came across. Hopefully, I wasn’t on air when I hung up on the first guy…

“You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? They hand me a script. I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.”

– Brad Pitt, Actor

Buenos Aires – A couple of recent interviews have come and gone. The first was conducted by Max Morales via e-mail and appeared today on his website, Andeswines [Interview no longer online.]. It was fun getting to talk about the thoughts behind how the various projects I’m involved in got off the ground and what inspired them. Besides, I can do e-mail interviews in my jammies…

Laura Gambale of the local weekend newspaper Perfil called up and asked a few questions about how Casa SaltShaker works. It was a fairly short interview, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t say the things she quotes me as saying, but as producer Aaron Spelling has noted – it likely sounded better than anything I actually did say. We have to get some new publicity photos though, the re-use of photos that have already been published in other places and are just off of our website is tired. Most interesting in the article, for me anyway, was finding out about two other local in-home restaurants that I didn’t know about!

More interviews or articles that look like they’ll be coming out in the near future – the Spanish language version of Cosmo… Smithsonian magazine… and local paper La Nación (who’ve already written about us thrice over the last year and half. Phone calls from three local radio stations asking for live interviews (I passed, that’s just a bit much, and I can’t think of anything that I’m going to say coherently in Spanish when I’m on the spot…) about this “new trend” (they clearly haven’t read my piece in the Guardian). Life is taking some interesting twists and turns all of the sudden.

“I’m not going to make calf’s brains. But at a certain point, I’d like to retain the permission to do something that’s delicious — to have the chance to win them over.”

– from The Finicky Gourmet by Alexandra Jacobs, in the NY Times

Buenos Aires – There’s no question that I’ve invited this surplus upon myself. It was something that started out simple enough – an enquiry when folks reserved at Casa SaltShaker as to whether they were allergic to anything that I needed to be concerned about. My intent was to avoid sending anyone off to Hospital Alemán’s emergency room, or worse, the Recoleta Cemetery. Now and again, someone would ask if I could accomodate something that wasn’t an allergy, but was either a dietary restriction or preference… low sodium, or no red meat… that sort of thing… and everyone was very understanding about how it might be approached. For over a year and a half I’ve done my best to supply an alternative, or fit their needs, wants, desires. When I didn’t feel I could, I simply let them know, and left it to their decision whether or not they still wanted to come – no hard feelings if not, perhaps another time…? Every now and again I forgot when it came to planning a menu, but we worked it all out before anyone keeled over.

Somewhere along the line, about 7-8 months ago, I decided to just include the question in my responses to reservation requests – any dietary restrictions, or things you simply can’t or won’t eat? Initially, I got few additional requests – perhaps a few more vegetarian requests, or pescetarian sorts (there is no such thing as a “fish eating vegetarian” – fish are meat, you’re not a vegetarian, and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise – you simply choose not to eat red meat and/or poultry, for whatever your reasons are – medical, spiritual, religious, capricious) – and, it’s irrelevant, I respect the request, and when possible, I go for it. In truth, it’s often the easiest – most of our meals start with three vegetable appetizers, perhaps one that’s fish based, rarely are they red meat, other than perhaps as a garnish or addition that can be left out of a portion – and if the main course is a simple piece of meat prepared with a particular sauce and garnish, it’s generally easy to substitute another type of meat, or something vegetable, soy, or grain based. Sometimes it’s not easy to do, and I simply won’t – a long cooked stew, like our recent couple of lamb curries – and I simply pass that info on.

But the last month or two have brought a heavy increase in requests – notedly hand in hand with us moving into tourist season, and particularly from the U.S. and western Europe – more the former than the latter. I know the U.S. is apparently in some sort of epidemic of food allergies – it’s been reported in all sorts of press, popular and medical – and there are many theories on why. I also know that both categories of folk are big on various diets. And, this is where it’s led us to…

Over a one month period, i.e., 8 dinners, the requests have run: 2 no fish (allergy), 1 no shellfish (allergy), 1 no bivalves (allergy), 1 no nuts (allergy), 1 no dairy (allergy), 1 no raw nuts (allergy), 1 no raw onions (allergy), 3 no seafood (preference), 4 no red meat (lifestyle), 2 vegetarian (lifestyle), 1 no pork (preference), 1 no cilantro (preference), 1 no raw meat (preference), 1 no mango (preference), 1 no eggplant (yick), 6 no pork or shellfish (pseudo-kosher requests), 1 no cheese (appalling), 1 no mayo (preference), 1 nothing cooked with alcohol (preference), 1 no garlic (had a date after dinner), 1 no squid (icky), 1 nothing with sugar in it (on a diet), 1 no olives (textural), 1 no olive oil (on a diet???), 1 no tomatoes (preference), 1 no chocolate (preference), 1 no blue cheese (ewww)… you get the idea… out of 39 requests, only 8 are allergies, the rest are all a personal lifestyle choice and/or “I don’t like/want…”. At the same time I’ve turned down a dozen requests for “strictly vegan”, “don’t seat me with tourists”, “don’t seat me with anyone who doesn’t speak English”, “provide a babysitter for our children”, “our children want to learn to cook, we’ll be dropping them off for the day for you to teach”, “we’re bringing our dogs”, “we want to eat earlier”, “we want to eat later”…

So, here’s the scoop. I’m going back to just asking about allergies. When it comes to personal preferences, other than something simple for me to deal with (not to do a “poor me” – I enjoy cooking, and putting on these dinners – but I’m the sole cook, for a five course meal for twelve people… that’s sixty plates of food out of an apartment kitchen, just to do the math for you – I don’t have a kitchen staff to prep something else), I’m simply no longer going to worry about them. I am going to make it easier, you’ll note that I’ve started posting the planned menus at the same time as posting the themes for the evenings – which won’t always tell you if a particular dish contains something you don’t like to eat, but at least may give us a start. I’m happy to entertain inquiries about whether or not I can accomodate something, but I’ve gotten far less interested in whether or not I will – while folks are paying for the opportunity to come to dinner here, it’s a set menu dinner party in our home, it’s not a restaurant with a list of choices, it’s “closed door” for a reason – not exclusivity, but at the same time, not simply open to anyone to walk in. And, I have numerous friends here who have other sorts of in-home or regular restaurants where the food may fit closer to what a given customer is looking for… picky eaters are welcome, truly, but just like going to a dinner party at anyone’s home, may just have to accept, if they choose to come, that their preferences won’t be catered to.