bye bye stoneface

So it's official, "Jaks Kitchen" has moved in down the street, replacing the iconic original location of "Stoneface Dolly's" gourmet homestyle eatery. I am, tres triste. I've been going for brunch still, albeit not as often, regularily over the past few months during the long transition. I've got a few things to say about the changes, and what i like and dislike. I realize some of the things that have changed will improve over time given that it is technically a new restaurant, but i'm going to mention them anyways.

Good Changes
Fruit - the new fruit is good. Big chunks of cantelope and pineapple. The fruit has gone from a whole variety, big pieces to small, on the plate to a bowl, and then back again. I actually can't remember how it was originally, but i remember the occasional blueberry. Now i'm not so sure this is a good change.
Renos - they did some renovations that gave the place a bit more space, which is definitely good.

Ambivalent Changes
Decor - i really liked the old art, then the transitional chunky art, and now i like the mirrors. The new paint is nice too.
Service - the old girls and guys served great, and so are the new. I miss the old cause they knew me of course, and i'm saddened the new may not get to know me as quickly, but i can't hold that against them.
Coffee - perhaps it hasn't changed, i'm not sure, but its still damn good.

Negative Changes
Service Times - No matter how busy it used to be, i used to be able to be in and out in 30 min or so. Last time, i was waiting at LEAST 30 min just for my food, and it wasn't that busy.
Homies - they don't even call them homies anymore!! They used to have chunks of onion and peppers in em, at least on occasion, and they just tasted better. The new ones are probably healthier tho, less butter, but the old ones definitely tasted better
Omlettes - um, hello?? Can i have cheese in my omellete. Both myself and my friend got omlettes, her the goat cheese, me the fruilano (now called peppers and spinach). Neither of us could taste the cheese, and my friend asked them to check that it was in there... they said it was. I'm skeptical. Mine was just not cooked right, the egg was too cooked, and i don't think the spinach was saute'ed at all before going in. Thats just a no-no, especially when you can't taste the cheese.
Portions - the portions are smaller, not by much, but by a little
Coffee Creamers - different company now, used to be organic creamers, now its just regular stuff.
Brunch Specials - there is a complete lack of these alltogether! The specials before were what i went for, only occasionally did i not get the semi-special eggs blackstone or mexican fritatta. Now, there are no specials, and thats just uninspired.

Let me now say this. Breakfast, was awesome, no doubt about it! One of the best breakfasts in ottawa, was and still is. But when you mess with a winning formula, even just a little, its liable to piss a few people (aka me) off. I will go back, i will grow to love it i'm sure, but i'm a little bitter that such an awesome place would every change, even a little bit.

top uberalbums of 2006

I've been reading pitchforkmedia for some time, mostly for their top albums reviews (2006, 2005, 90s). 2006 is no different, i'm supremely interested in all they recommend. And thanks to a friend of mine, i discovered another music site, short list of music, that has also catalogued their favorite albums of the previous few years (in no particular order).

In order to "give something back" to the community and at the advice of this same friend, i've decided to cross reference the 2 lists this year, looking for hip similarities, exclusions, and things that i already think are large, or think i will probably think is large at some point during 2007.

Album	Pitchfork Rank	On Longlist	Large	Likely to become Large
Band Of Horses - Everything All The Time	12	Yes	Yes
Belle And Sebastian - The Life Pursuit	30	Yes
Cat Power - The Greatest	28	Yes
Danielson - Ships	31	Yes		Yes
Girl Talk - Night Ripper	34	Yes
Hot Chip - The Warning	26	Yes
Joanna Newsom - Ys	3	Yes	Yes
Liars - Drum's Not Dead	6	Yes		Yes
Lupe Fiasco - Food & Liquor	32	Yes		Yes
Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast	47	Yes
TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain	2	Yes		Yes
The Decemberists - The Crane Wife	41	Yes	Yes
The Knife - Silent Shout	1	Yes
Be Your Own Pet - Be Your Own Pet	21
Beach House - Beach House	16
Booka Shade - Movements	50
Boris - Pink	9			Yes
Brightblack Morning Light - Brightblack Morning Light	36
Califone - Roots & Crowns	27			Yes
Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country	45			Yes
Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury	7
DJ Drama & Lil Wayne - Dedication 2	37
Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies	18
Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra Of Bubbles	49
Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things	39
Ghostface Killah - Fishscale	4
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House	8			Yes
Herbert - Scale	35
J Dilla - Donuts	38
Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye	11
Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds	25
LCD Soundsystem - 45:33	22
Lily Allen - Alright, Still	29
M. Ward - Post-War	46
Man Man - Six Demon Bag	20			Yes (Zaphods, tonite!)
Mastodon - Blood Mountain	42
Mission Of Burma - The Obliterati	33
Peter Bjorn And John - Writer's Block	24			Yes
Phoenix - It's Never Been Like That	13
Scott Walker - The Drift	10
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped	43			Yes
Sunset Rubdown - Shut Up I Am Dreaming	15
T.I. - King	19
Tapes 'N Tapes - The Loon	40
The Hold Steady - Boys And Girls In America	5		Ya, Duh??
The Long Blondes - Someone To Drive You Home	48
The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes	44
The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine	17
Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet	14
Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass	23
Against Me! - Americans Abroad Live In London		Yes
And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - So Divided		Yes
Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock & Roll		Yes
Beck - The Information		Yes
Beirut - Gulag Orskestar		Yes	Yes
Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go		Yes		Yes
CSS - Cansei De Ser Sexy		Yes
Country Teasers - The Empire Strikes Back		Yes
Cursive - Happy Hollow		Yes
Dabrye - Two/Three		Yes
Dead Heart Bloom - Dead Heart Bloom		Yes
Editors - The Back Room		Yes
Field Music - Field Music		Yes
Forgive Durden - Wonderland		Yes
Jeremy Enigk - World Waits		Yes
Kidd Jordan - Hamid Drake + William Parker- Palm Of Soul		Yes
Kimya Dawson - Remember That I Love You		Yes
Love Is All - Nine Times That Same Song		Yes
Mates Of State - Bring It Back		Yes
Mew - And The Glass Hand Kites		Yes
Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther		Yes
Mohair - Small Talk		Yes
Mute Math - Mutemath		Yes
Neil Young - Living With War		Yes
OOIOO - Taiga		Yes
Peeping Tom - Peeping Tom		Yes
Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers		Yes
Regina Spektor - Begin To Hope		Yes
Roots - Game Theory		Yes		Yes
Secret Machines - Ten Silver Drops		Yes
Serena Maneesh - Serena Maneesh		Yes
Skream - Skream		Yes
Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYo		Yes
Teddybears - Soft Machine		Yes
The Blow - Paper Television		Yes
The Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control		Yes
The Hush Sound - Like Vines		Yes
The Stills - Without Feathers		Yes
The Strokes - First Impression Of Earth		Yes
The Velvet - Teen Cum Laude		Yes
The Weepies - Say I Am You		Yes
Tom Waits - Orphans		Yes	Ya, but its not really 2006
Vaux - Beyond Virture Beyond Vice		Yes
We Are Scientists - With Love And Squalor		Yes
Wolfmother - Wolfmother		Yes
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones		Yes		Yes
the Bronx - The Bronx		Yes

If you've got any suggestions for albums to check out on the list, let me hear em. Or perhaps if you know of a better way of presenting this massive tabular data on a blog, cause i agree this is nasty.

lunchtime

Not much has changed, not much is new. Life has been very good lately. As evidence of this, i will present this image, my lunch on this march 16th 2007.
- de cecco tagliatelle, comes in spools, best dried pasta you can buy
- 3 large mushrooms, sliced
- 8 cherry tomatos, halved
- a bunch green onions, 1.5 inch pieces
- 3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
- half red pepper - unnecessary
- pinches of hot peppers
- tons of s & p
- large bunch parsley, chopped
- a tablespoon or 2 of olive oil
- a bit of wine, a bit of broth, optional, unnecessary

1 Start water on high, start fry pan on med-high
2 add shrooms n pepper, cook for a few min
3 add pasta to water when boiling
4 add oil and s n p n hot peppers to pan
5 a few min later add rest of stuff to fry pan
6 keep on kookin!
7 when pasta done, spoon directly into pan, add a bit more oil, combine

Eat!!! This may not be everyones cup of tea, but a refreshing pasta lunch like this revitalizes me like nothing else.

I'm working from home today, it rules. Things of note:
- Apparently my blog is worth a little over 500 bux:
- Its getting warmer! Soon to start running in prep for 10 million K!!!
- House stuff mostly on hold, trying to find people to build a deck for you can be hard work.

inspired by seahorses

I think this is pretty inspiring. Even without him ever earning a dime for it, I think its beautiful, and sad to think of what was happening to those precious baby seahorses (being chewed up).

I think its also scary and great that CBC calls it news!!!

cats attacking

Ok, now that i have cats, its time to mix that and youtube and show you all what my cats can do. This is just the first vid, no edits, but i think it speaks for itself if you can wait through the first dark 15 seconds.

idea - returnable take out bins

Thanks to the ontario's governments great new idea/plan to return various liquor bottles to the beer store, i've come up with another idea.

The amount of garbage i create has gone down considerably since i've got a compost.  The most massive thing that gets added to my garbage these days is take out bins, styrophoam, and i guess the tops of the metal ones.  What if various environ-concious restaurants (ie green door, table) joined a program where their take outs were actually decent plastic/pyrex/ceramic containers with good tops (microwavable of course) and charged a deposit for them, say, 5$.  Each of the bins/containers would have some sore of id/barcode/something on the bottom so as to discourage falsifying them for the 5$.  Any store that took part could have the (dirty) containers returned to them.

I'm thinking a place like the yangtzee could cut down massively on landfill if they did this.  Think about the amount of landfill they take up in a night for their hot and sour soup take outs?  I must take up a cubic metre a year just on those styrophoam things...  i'd gladly pay a 5$ deposit for each thingy, could exchange them with the delivery guy after the first purchase, etc..

Well?  Would it fly??  Been done?

hot peppers service for 12 not so hot

Last night myself and a whole bunch of friends went to hot peppers for a birthday celebration. We sat upstairs in the very delightful decor. I'm writing this post, because, well, i'm disgruntled at the service we recieved. It wasn't necessarily bad, and my expectations are probably too high, but o well, i'm gonna mention it anyways cause its kinda funny.

Ordering drinks alone was a bit of an ordeal. Most of the beer selections we asked for weren't available. Some people weren't even told, their beers just didn't show up. Someone ordered coconut water, and it took 10 minutes (or more) for the girl to to tell us, upon a remind, that they didn't have any. I had hogardden, and it arrived pretty promptly. Some people ordered caesars thinking they had sake in them. But no, those are the special "hot peppers" caesars, and when finally ordered were pretty kickass. The regular ones were really good too.

I ordered the tom yum, and as i remembered, it was awesome. Everyone ordered something different, some shared, some not. The food was, really good. Not the best ever, but i've never had the best ever thai (as i think i've previously mentioned). Thai is normally pretty large, but never "blow you away". Lots of flavour, lots of kick, lots of love, but i guess as a personal feeling is missing that savourness that i've found in other dishes that just make me die and go to heaven (fettucine carbonara comes to mind... mabye i'm just missing dairy ::))).

Anyways, it took a while to get our food, in general. Me and my gf ordered 2 dishes, and some rice. To start, we got one dish. 10 minutes later everyone else had (almost) everything, and we still had our only dish that we had been picking at, sans rice. We had to remind about the rice when our other dish arrived, and it showed up shortly thereafter. Anyways, the food was really good, as i said.

One of my friends ordered 2 dishes, and was going to share 1 of them with another. Only one of them ever showed up. When everyone was almost done he reminded her, she was apologetic, and offered to get it then. He declined, and then she offered to have it prepared to go free of charge. He declined that too, stubborn yes, but whatever, he was kind of annoyed and didn't want to carry it around for the rest of the night (we were going elsewheres after).

She was very slow with the bills, but did bring out our custom cake as we asked. I only ended up getting 2 drinks over the 4 hours because it was just slow. In the end, everyone was dinged for a 15% gratuity on their food orders. Fair enough, it probably told us this on the menus. But the funniest thing was for my friends bill, the one that missed an order, she forgot to add the 15%. She had the gaul to approach him after, tell him that she forgot it, and informed him that he didn't tip enough to cover it.... he was a little confused, and basically brushed it off, without paying. I think if lacked the competance to charge someone for gratuity who probably wouldn't pay it, you shouldn't approach them after to pay it. It was ballsy though, i'll give her that!

Anyway... i just felt the need to rant about this. Again, food, awesome, service, less than so. I guess its hard to get good service for 12 people. The girl was just serving us and another relatively large table, but i guess it was a little too much. I should say she was very kind and very nice, but just a little less than prompt.