Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide

Rasika West End (Rasika II), web site, 1177 22nd Street NW, Washington, DC, 202-466-2500 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [Google | WaPo | dishtip (Rasika) | Washingtonian | Yelp | Gayot]

Now better than Rasika proper, the home base. Get the spinach chat, the aloo tikki, the sev puri, the scallop appetizer, the lamb chop tandoori, the cod dish with two flavors, the duck curry with coconut milk, and the dark lentils for an excellent meal. The other dishes are generally good but not as good as those. Not cheap, but one of the better meals in town these days.

This piece is by me, in The Washington Post. Here is one bit:

The key is to hit these restaurants in the “sweet spot” of their cycle of rise and fall. At any point in time Washington probably has five to 10 excellent restaurants; they just don’t last very long at their highest levels of quality.

Here’s how it works. A new chef opens a place or a well-known chef comes to town and starts up a branch. Good reviews are essential to get the place off the ground, and so they pull out all stops to make the opening three months, or six months, special. And it works. In today’s world of food blogs, Twitter and texting, the word gets out quickly.
. . .
Through information technology, we have speeded up the cycle of the rise and fall of a restaurant. Once these places become popular, their obsession with quality slacks off. They become socializing scenes, the bars fill up with beautiful women (which attracts male diners uncritically), and they become established as business and power broker spots. Their audiences become automatic. The transients of Washington hear about where their friends are going, but they are less likely to know about the hidden gem patronized by the guy who has been hanging around for 23 years, and that in turn means those gems are less likely to exist in the first place.

In economic terms, think of this as a quest for the thick market externalities. Search and monitoring are most intense in the early stages of a restaurant’s life, and so that is the best time to go. There is an analogy in music: Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry do not always give the very best concerts, because they do not have to. You may or may not like up-and-coming bands, but at least they will be trying very hard.

The full article is here.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

Jacob Grier has an excellent post on this topic (which I do not cover), here is just one part of a longer discussion:

Reading An Economist Gets Lunch inspired me to think explicitly about how to find good food in American bars. Here are a few general suggestions based on my own experience:

Avoid places with lots of vodka and light rum. These can be bought cheaply and are easy to dress up in crowd-pleasing ways with liqueurs, fruit, and herbs. If these are what the customers are demanding than the food may be equally designed for broad appeal.

Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, Jackson, WY 9-2011, by Don Graham

In contrast, look for ingredients that signal a knowledgeable staff and consumers. Italian amari, herbal liqueurs, rhum agricole, quality mezcal, batavia arrack, and – lucky for me – genever are good indicators. If I see a bar stocked with these I’ll want to see the food menu.

Go into the city. The density of consumers with expendable income, knowledge of food and drinks, and access to transportation that doesn’t require them to drive is in urban areas.

Laws matter. In some states regulations require that places selling spirits also serve food. Where these laws don’t exist, many of the best cocktail destinations won’t bother much or at all with food, so one might plan to eat and drink separately. (These laws are bad news if you just want to drink, since your drink prices may be covering the cost of an under-utilized cook and kitchen or bars may simply close earlier to save on labor. Virginia’s law creates particularly perverse incentives.)

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

Keren Restaurant, 1780 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, DC (near 18th and U Streets NW), 202-265-5764 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [Google | AllMenus | City Paper | Yelp]

Eritrea 2011, by thecomeupshow

This place is exactly what more ethnic restaurants in DC should be like. Eritrean food will remind you of Ethiopian, but it isn’t the same either. There is more bread mixed into the dishes for one thing, and the cuisine is overall less Americanized. The vegetables are less smoothed over. What you want to get here is the listed “Five Eritrean dishes” listed on the bottom of the menu, otherwise not further specified. Also get one or two of the “Fuls,” which are available for breakfast too. The Egg Ful is especially tasty. The wheat dishes are original.

Everything here is quite good, and the staff and proprietor are quite charming. A strong restaurant on all dimensions and also extremely cheap. By the way, maybe you knew the “old Keren,” but the place is under new management circa 2012 and is much improved.

So how did American food fall to the depths of 1960? In Cowen’s view, it wasn’t the doing of greedy agribusiness in league with the Mad Men. Three great tsunamis wrecked the American palate: Prohibition, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the rise of TV and the empire of children. When I first arrived at Michigan State University back in 1971, I noticed that the faculty club was far from campus—in fact, just outside the city limit. Why? Because East Lansing, where beer pong now reigns on weekends, was dry until 1968 (that’s four years after the Beatles invaded). Even today, we learn from Cowen, about 18 million Americans live in dry communities in states like Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas. The Eighteenth Amendment put good restaurants out of business or drove them into the grip of gangsters and corrupt officials, and opened the legitimate restaurants that remained to children and their childish tastes. The Great Depression and the Second World War then extended the culinary hangover for another 20 years after Prohibition’s repeal in 1930.

Far less than Europeans and Asians, American parents “parent,” which means, Cowen says, giving in to their kids’ whims and demands. Kids like to eat things that are soft, smooth, and sweet: hence the ubiquitous Big Mac. So it wasn’t the producers (i.e., agribusiness) that ruined American food. Cowen concedes that TV advertising made it possible for them to appeal profitably to mass audiences and thus mass taste. But the producers didn’t create that taste, which was long in the making from the effects of public policy and social forces. Along with producing an abundance that wiped out hunger and malnutrition in the United States and elsewhere (our problem today is obesity, not starvation), the producers catered to an America that knew almost nothing about the wonders of good food.

“Food Rules!” by Jerry Weinberger, City Journal, May 18, 2012 (review of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, by Tyler Cowen.)

Great Wall Supermarket, web site, 2982 Gallows Road, Falls Church, VA, 703-208-3320 (Metro Trip Planner – opens in new window) [Patch | Yahoo Local | Yelp]

Here is my essay from Washingtonian magazine, adapted from An Economist Gets Lunch, about what it is like to shop at a Chinese supermarket for a month. Here is one bit about search theory:

Then there’s getting your cart down the aisle. The main aisles fit two carts side by side, barely. It’s hard to get down the aisles, and that discourages browsing. My initial tendency was to search the empty aisles, if only because I knew I could get down them without much delay. This obviously isn’t the best strategy, and it led me to spend too much time looking at the highly durable items, which are purchased less frequently by other customers. Overall, I felt far less mobile than in an American supermarket. I started going later at night and avoiding the weekends to circumvent these problems.

It’s common to see a Great Wall customer spending a solid minute or two inspecting the quality of a pineapple, thereby blocking that portion of the aisle. The customers who seek green peas go through the bin pea by pea. One woman became entranced picking out the best garlic chives, and a man asked for sales help in selecting the best clams–by what standard he judged them I’m not sure. No one was much enamored of the scooping technique for filling a plastic bag.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

“Asian Imports–That Other Asian Supermarket,” by Jimmy Scarano, Falls Church Times, March 19, 2010
“Great Wall Grocery managers face charges over live animals,” by Stephen Tschida, ABC7, March 27, 2012

The review is here, by Will Dean, the summary is here:

If you’re interested in how the food and restaurant industries work – and how to exploit those factors for your own good – then Cowen’s work is indispensable.

And:

All good advice. It has no recipes, few restaurant recommendations and no famous chef names, but An Economist Gets Lunch might be the most interesting book about food you read all year.

originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

Josh Schonwald says yes:

One night, after reading about sugar-cane drinks and fresh lobster skewers, I started cooking. I made a spicy okra salad, grilled shrimp piri piri and steamed vanilla pudding. The next night, Zanzibari pizzas–chapati stuffed with eggs, meat and spices. Later, I had a Mozambican seafood stew with Senegalese-style jollof rice. I started seeing it.

Zanzibar Pizza at Forodhani Gardens, by fabulousfabs

As fast-growing African nations become more prosperous, they will develop something that is rare right now–a middle class with disposable time and income. Poverty, hunger, war and sickness are why Africans–from Cameroon to Mozambique to Namibia to Congo—have been unable to develop a baobab-infused vinaigrette.

I very much enjoyed Josh’s new food book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, and I can recommend it for its pro-science stance, its interesting speculations, and its excellent reporting. My prediction, by the way, based on demographics, is that the next big food trend will be more from the Latino cuisines, fused with American ideas to appeal to the (North) American palate. Chipotle is but one step in this direction. Sadly, in my view most Americans have room for only a few foreign cuisines in their lives. Thai and Indian are knocking on the door of Mexican and Chinese (all in their American versions), but I do not see new contenders for that throne.

Originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

Cowen fears the effects of gentrification, which tends to drive up real estate rates and drive out ethnic restaurants. It can also lead to blander food. But if defense funding is cut, and the impact is felt locally, that would be a good thing for ethnic restaurants, if not for the populace in general, Cowen said.

And finally, some more helpful tips for ethnic restaurant exploration: “It’s all about the ordering,” Cowen said. The best places have smaller menus, so they aren’t trying to please everyone, and likely do several things very well. Don’t ask the waiter what’s good, “that will only confuse them.” Instead, ask, “What dish do you have here which is special?” or “What are your regional specialties.”

That is from Tom Jackman, here is more. Also from the Post today, Tim Carman adds further discussion.

originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.

The best food choices in NoVa these days, Cowen said, are the Bolivian food in Arlington and Falls Church; the Ethio­pian along George Mason Drive in Baileys; the Korean food in Annandale; and the Vietnamese food at the Eden Center in Falls Church.

Bang Ga Nae

Don’t go into a restaurant with many beautiful women in it, says economist Tyler Cowen. Those places attract a lot of men, and although they may be popular for a few months the quality inevitably will soon diminish.

Don’t go into restaurants in city centers, Mr. Cowen says. Their rents are high, so they have to make money on a high volume of business, which leads to problems with food and service.

Don’t go into restaurants where people are smiling, he says. That indicates they are there to socialize, and are not truly serious about food.

Mr. Cowen is not the first person to formulate this theory, of course. Calvin Trillin memorably wrote that when he goes to a new town, he doesn’t want to go to the restaurant where you’d take your parents, he wants to go to the one where you’d take your old army buddy. Mr. Cowen even cites Mr. Trillin’s famous dislike of generic continental cuisine establishments that he referred to as La Maison de la Casa House.
. . .
Sure, you may proudly display your kid’s fingerpainting on the fridge. It may fill your soul with happiness every time you see it. But every once in a while, it’s nice to look at a Picasso.

“Don’t hate the haute,” by Daniel Newman, Toledo Blade, April 24, 2012

Link originally posted on Marginal Revolution – click to see comments and suggestions.