My BurgerMap

www.awesomeopolis.com/burgermap

BurgerMap Philly is here! Around 40 Philadelphia burger-serving locations rated and reviewed by yours truly on a color-coded Google map. This is an idea I've had for a while, but only recently got to work on. Right now it's a Beta version in the sense that I'm still playing around with it, and also in the sense that I don't have nearly enough burgers rated.

Comments? Suggestions? Suggestions for future burgers to rate? Disagreements? Post them here.

HoagieFest

I'm really excited for HoagieFest 2009. In fact, I am immediately endorsing this Fest. Read about it here at Awesomeopolis.

Yeah, I suck at posting this month. I work too much. Sorry, readers.

My lunches this week have been:
Monday - Two cheesesteaks (one regular, one chicken...why are food carts so cheap?)
Tuesday - Two-pound burrito (love that guac)
Wednesday - Half of a large double-pepperoni triple cheese pizza (w/extra cheese)
Thursday - Coated, battered and fried Chinese food. Delicious.

What will tomorrow have in store? Besides a defibrillator I mean.

Oh, yeah, and Monday for dinner I had 14 hamantaschen. Delicious!

Courtesy of Groucho: Scanwiches! Scans of sandwiches (cross-sectionally speaking)!

Pop Quiz: Did this website make me hungry? If you answered no, you're probably new here. Welcome, new reader!

Well, it's March, which means March Madness, and I can't think of anything more maddening than encountering something I can't eat, but I'm pretty sure this would drive me, or make me, mad (maybe both).

Leela: I'm afraid Fry is suffering from ocean madness.
Fry: Every time something good happens to me you say it's some kind of madness, or I'm drunk, or I ate too much candy. Well I saw a real mermaid and I wish for once my friends would have decency and kindness to believe me.
Leela [whispering]: Ocean madness.

My Burgers

I'm on a mission to find the best burger in Philadelphia. Any nominations?

Chuck and I are still thinking about our food blog, and I think it'd be neat to have a Burger Map of Philadelphia included, rating them on taste alone, then taking into account value and plotting an efficient frontier.

So far my front runners are Misconduct Tavern, Happy Rooster and in the cheap-eats category, Five Guys (ironically, all within a few blocks of each other). Honorable mentions go to Loie, Smith's, and ofcourse, Copa Banana on Half Priced Burger Wednesdays. This is all so far. I still have a lot of research to do.

My Sandwich, and an Economics Question

I want to eat this (scroll down for the double, the true object of my desire).

Also, does anyone think that tax cuts are going to be as government effective as spending in an economy where people are frightened, confused, uncertain, and facing next-to-zero interest rates which cripples the fed's ability to close the gap between capacity and output?

(Usually lowering interest rates incentivizes investment today over investment tomorrow, and in any reasonably normal credit market companies start requiring more services/goods/materials from each other...but the fed controlled rate is now in a band between 0 and 0.25%, and credit spreads, or risk premiums, are only now starting to come down from apocalyptic to huge.)

This is a cake.

I'd blog more, but I'm hungry.

I'll get back to serious posts soon enough, but for now I thought I'd share a website that Super King introduced to me. It's a restaurant review and ranking site, but it's remarkable for it's nation-wide reach, and for the fact that the rankings and ratings are based on tastiness of the food alone (the written reviews address other things, but if you're like me, you'll agree that rankings and ratings are already subjective enough without having to deal with the reviewer's opinion of the decor).

The website is www.gayot.com. One page I've fixated one (well, two pages, there's a "next") is the list of top restaurants in Philadelphia. I'd love to hit all of them at one point or another.

(There are a few restaurants notably absent from the list, such as Lacroix at the Rittenhouse and the Fountain at the Four Seasons--when restaurants are undergoing changes, their rankings are temporarily removed.)

[Editor's Note: the website is not just for Philadelphia. It has rankings, ratings, reviews and Top 10 category lists for restaurants nationally, and in many cities, from San Francisco to Harrisburg.]

My Kangaburger

A coworker informed me today that a restaurant in the Philly suburbs makes burgers out of exotic animals, most notably, kangaroo. Needless to say, I want one.

I realized shortly after my hunger for the meat down under (you have a sick mind, you know who you are and you know that's not what I meant, kangaroos are Australian...jeez) that this will put me at solidly having eaten three animals from Winnie the Pooh (Rabbit and Piglet being the first two). This bothered me. I always thought of the bunny I ate as more of a Thumper thing, but with Rabbit, Pig and Kangaroo soon to be under my belt (literally, ha!), this presents a problem. Piglet and Rabbit are annoying, but Kanga's a real sweetheart! This was going to take some mental reconciliation.

A few hours later I figured it out. Kanga's an absolute doll, but have you ever noticed how she's a single mom? To get over my mental block, I decided to pretend I'm eating Roo's deadbeat dad.

Now all is at peace in my mind, and come DeluxX's Spring Break, he and I will be off to try kangaroo and perhaps some other delicious meats, depending on the special (regular specials include elk, emu, and caribou).

For those of you interested, the locale is called the Half Moon Restaurant.

My New Treat

And now for something completely different:

http://foodproof.com/photos/full/bacon-cheese-roll-1290

[This has to be the least healthy and least kosher thing ever invented.]

My Central Pennsylvanian Restaurants

Central Pennsylvanian restaurants are totally backwards.

Monday night I was at Penn State visiting DeluxX. We went to a corner bar, called the Corner Room in fact. It looked a pub from the outside. It looked like a pub on the inside. The seats, the wooden tables, the outfits the staff was wearing. Except three things were amiss: there were classic red and white checkered diner place mats on the tables, there was no central "bar" area, and the whole place smelled like a diner. Turns out it WAS a diner. In a pub. Looked just like one, inside and out.


Tonight I went to a diner in Harrisburg. Outside was a classic 1950s diner. Inside it was laid out just like a diner. Except the counter area had a ton of booze behind it, all the furniture was in dark wood, and the chairs were pretty elevated off the ground. It was a bar!

Central PA has to get their restaurants straight. It's confusing me. Does anyone know what's going on?

So I saw an old rerun of Studio 60 (a show recommended to me by First Tiger--not bad, but no West Wing). Anyway, a pregnant character played by Amanda Peet placed a huge breakfast order, and I started developing a little celebrity crush. Then she said "and pancakes," and I swooned. Then her assistant came back ten seconds later with a bowl of some kind of cereal. The person she was eating with said "he got your order wrong" to which she replied "No, this is what I eat while I'm waiting for the food."

At this point I both fell in love and decided I should probably take one of those home pregnancy tests...

I just got back from the Eagles game. Preseason makes me hungry.

10 Foods Only America Could Have Invented.

Stay tuned for news regarding Chuck's and my upcoming food blog.

Max Power informed me that of all the links he's recently shown me, he prefers I blog about this one above all others:
http://www.notmartha.org/archives/2008/02/27/bacon-cups/

That said, there's not much to blog about. They kind of speak for themselves. How about..."delicious"

My 24,000 Calorie Breakfast

Yesterday morning, Joey Chestnut, the first and only human being (and the second Earthling*) to ever beat now-retired eating champion Kobayashi, won his third consecutive Wing Bowl Title. While the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest (where Chestnut beat his eastern rival) may be the most famous eating contest in the world, the Philadelphia Wing Bowl, always held early in the morning a couple days before the Super Bowl, has grown from a radio publicity stunt to the largest competitive eating event in the entire world.

Every year there's a sell-out crowd of around 20,000, with other gluttony-fans turned away at the door. And Joey Chestnut, 2 years after he made his glorious debut, has won his third straight crown, breaking the record with a hearty breakfast of 241 chicken wings (in under 45 minutes of eating). It was reported that each chicken wing is about 100 calories, making Joey's triumphant feast probably close to the--if not the single--most caloric breakfast in history. That's almost 2 weeks worth of calories for a normal person in one meal.

I don't like to toss around the word "hero" too liberally, but that's impressive. And it makes me hungry.

* - For those of you who are wondering, Kobayashi once lost a hot dog eating contest to a 900 pound Kodiak bear on Fox's "Man vs. Beast" special. I saw it; it was impressive. He had the lead for a while until the bear started swallowing multiple dogs at a time without chewing. Kobayashi retired after breaking his own world record for hot dog eating--in the same contest in which Chestnut broke it by slightly more. The Asian eating phenom had been having jaw problems and sought not to exacerbate them.