These flavors could change at any moment.  We’re open until 11PM but a lot of these flavors will be replaced before then.  So, for what it is worth, at 4PM…

French Vanilla
Belgian Chocolate
Mango
Malted Molasses
Goat Cheese Brownie
Lemon Espresso
Chocolate Coconut
Grape Nut Raisin
Strawberry
Tiramisu
Burnt Caramel
Trick or Treat
Maple Walnut
Cinnamon Nutmeg
Mocha
Bourbon Vienna Finger Cookie
Lemon
Sour Cherry Chip
White Coffee
The Elvis
Chocolate Chip
Drunken Pumpkin
Coffee Hydrox
Caramel Apple
Khulfee
Sweet Cream
Earl Grey
Cranberry Sorbet
Chocolate Sorbet

Lots of MEM Tea, Batdorf & Bronson Dancing Goats Coffee, George Howell Silk Pyjamas and Espresso 7 from Barismo.

Tomorrow, Saturday we serve Breakfast@TheBigTable from 10AM>2PM.
On Sunday we serve the lighter and smaller Bagel Bar.

Salem Ma. has a great museum, The Peabody Essex Museum designed by Moshe Safdie, , a wonderful bakery, A & J King at 48 Central St. and a wonderful coffee shop, Jaho Coffee Shop at 197 Derby St., with the only Kyoto iced coffee apparatus in Eastern Mass.  Now The Peabody Essex Museum has a special show worth driving up Interstate 95.    Remember if you go north on Interstate 93 you will end up in Salem NH.  No sales tax and a great state liquor store.  So be careful.
OCTOBER 20, 2010

A Paradise of Illusion

By LEE LAWRENCE

Salem, Mass.

‘The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City” is not so much a show as an experience. Its subject is a 1.5-acre garden complex inside the Tranquility and Longevity Palace, a compound that the fifth Qing Emperor, Qianlong, built in the 1770s in the northwest corner of Beijing’s Forbidden City.

Since 2003, the Peabody Essex Museum has housed “Yin Yu Tang,” a transplanted 200-year-old Chinese home in which everything is authentic, from the joinery to the chamber pots. To visit “Yin Yu Tang” is to be teleported to Huizhou province. Visiting “Private Paradise,” on the other hand, is to step into an illusory world created around transplanted objects. The journey at times feels awkward, but mostly the show successfully guides our experience, offering insights into both the emperor’s character and the complex art form that is the Chinese garden.

Rooted in the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C.), Chinese gardens by the 18th century combined architecture, vegetation, rockeries, poetry, and the decorative and visual arts to create self-contained worlds. The Qianlong Garden has four connected courtyards with seven buildings, six pavilions, two bowers, a number of rockeries, one belvedere and such poetically named spaces as “Terrace for Collecting Morning Dew.”

And artworks—thrones, screens, murals, calligraphy and painting, lacquerware and bronzes, scholar’s rocks and stone carvings. On display are about 90 such works from the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum, which since 2001 has been collaborating with the World Monuments Fund to restore and conserve the Qianlong Garden. The restoration is slated for completion in 2019.

Ironically, the first thing we see in “Private Paradise” is something the emperor hid from view: a screen made of zitan, a rare hardwood, across which parade luminous gold and silver floral compositions. They are so luxurious and elegant it is surprising to learn that they spent centuries facing a wall. The emperor was more interested in the opposite side of the screen, with its succession of starkly depicted male figures, old and sometimes grotesque. His compatriots would recognize them as luohan, enlightened disciples of the Buddha. By displaying the screen across from a throne and a 5-foot-tall portrait of the elderly emperor, curator Nancy Berliner draws for Americans the connection the emperor saw between secular and religious achievements. According to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, Qing emperors and luohans played important roles in preparing the way for the Buddha of the Future.

These depictions of luohan are copies of rubbings from stone carvings that—bear with this—copy the copy of a much admired ninth-century painting by the Tang poet and monk Guanxiu. Not only that, but while the figures look like rubbings on white paper, they are actually crafted of precious white jade.

This sets the stage for what is to come. We thread our way around corners, through narrow archways and tall gateways. Turn away from two lacquered and gilded cabinets and we spot a doorway filled with a photo of bamboo trees. In a niche with a lotus gate and a poem by the emperor on the essence of a good life, we glance up at windows and, through tricks of light and image, glimpse sunlit rooftops. Museums increasingly deploy such techniques to suggest context, but here they also feed into one of the show’s main themes: the emperor’s interest in the play between illusion and reality.

Take the gallery devoted to “Three Friends of Winter” motifs—pine, bamboo and plum trees, symbolizing chastity, uprightness, purity and renewal. On a set of screens, reliefs of these trees float within the frame, an effect achieved by attaching the carvings to a sheet of imported glass, making the screen solid yet see-through. In another gallery, space artificially expands thanks to an 18th-century trompe l’oeil mural using a European treatment of perspective introduced by Jesuit missionaries. Mirrors are another favorite artifice. Peering at European scenes painted on mirrored glass, we cannot help but wonder whether the emperor delighted in seeing himself projected into the imaginary landscape.

But for all its imaginative fun, the Qianlong Garden was primarily a place for serious contemplation. A table made in zitan carved to look like gnarled branches of a plum tree could be read as just another bit of trickery. Or as a reminder that the ordinary is precious. Just as a stone slab whose markings suggest the outline of a seated figure can be both a curiosity and an inspiration. “Appearing to be stone, but not being stone,” the emperor wrote, “As if hidden, as if apparent / the Universal Gate reveals its traces.”

As we near the end of the show, the garden’s spiritual underpinnings become more explicit. A mandala’s placement and unusual appearance force us to pause. Like many Tibetan Buddhist depictions of the cosmos, it is painted on silk; but this one has niches that house gilded clay statues, the largest of which is the emperor himself as the Bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri. When we walk around it, we encounter a shrine. Only a foot high, it invites us to lean in to see the softly illuminated Buddha inside. The effect is calming. At a second shrine, we pause again. From this quieter place our focus gradually broadens as we move to a slightly larger shrine, then to a three-dimensional mandala. It is a journey of introspection and spiritual discovery that all religious traditions map in one form or another. Here, it reminds us that the emperor saw himself as part of a much larger universe—one that he hoped time in the Qianlong Garden would help him understand.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

And these are the flavors at 620PM.  We close at 11PM but the flavors may change before then.  If you’re looking for something that is not on the menu board be sure to ask.  We’ll get it if we can.

French Vanilla
Belgian Chocolate
Mango
Rum Raisin
CBC Pumpkin Ale
Hydrox Cookie
Khulfee
Grape Nut
Mocha Chocolate Chip
Cocoa Pudding
Maple Walnut
Burnt Caramel
Strabwerry Marscapone
Sweet Cream
Nocciola
Mocha
Chocolate Chip
Coffee
Mixed Berry
Earl Grey
Lemongrass
Bourbon
Guinness
Cake Batter
Heath Bar
Malted Molasses
Ginger Snap Molasses
Vienna Finger Cookie
Black Bottom Pie

Strawberry Blueberry Sorbet
Chocolate Sorbet

From Saturday’s paper, Oct 16.

latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1016-shoup-20101016,0,1093156.story
latimes.com

He puts parking in its place

UCLA professor Donald Shoup, hailed as the ‘prophet of parking,’ believes free or inexpensive space for cars is at the root of many an urban ill: congestion, sprawl, wasteful energy use, air pollution.

By Martha Groves, Los Angeles Times

October 16, 2010

Donald Shoup has a quick comeback when people introduce him, as they often do, as the “parking rock star.”

‘Parking rock star’ is an oxymoron, like ‘rap music,’” the UCLA urban planning professor quips, his green eyes twinkling. “Maybe I should change my name to Shoup Dogg.”

Add another moniker for a man who has been hailed as the “prophet of parking,” the ” Jane Jacobs of parking policy” and the inspiration for a Facebook group called “The Shoupistas.”

The last is a fitting term for disciples of the Yale-trained economist, whom many credit with fomenting a long-overdue revolution in parking. At a sprightly 72, he is invited to expound his theories at brown-bag seminars and transportation conferences all over the world, from San Francisco to Sydney, where he’ll speak in November.

Why parking — a mundane, eye-glazing, exasperating aspect of life? (Even Shoup, who finds the subject fascinating, says: “Nothing is more pedestrian than parking.”)

According to Shoup, free parking is at the root of many urban ills: congestion, sprawl, wasteful energy use and air pollution.

City governments contribute to all these ills, he says, by requiring too many parking spaces for all development. The high cost of the required parking increases the prices we pay for everything else, including housing. “We have expensive housing and free parking,” he says. “We have our priorities the wrong way around.”

When street parking is free or inexpensive — as in many cities — demand exceeds supply, and people spend time and fuel cruising for scarce spaces. Cheap street parking thus increases congestion by encouraging people to drive rather than walk, pedal or take public transit.

Too many people, Shoup says, have grown conditioned to think like George Costanza, comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s neurotic sidekick on “Seinfeld,” the 1990s sitcom about nothing.

Parking at a garage is “like going to a prostitute,” Costanza intoned in an episode titled “The Parking Space.” “Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?”

Shoup’s 2005 book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” for many the de facto bible on the subject, posits a simple-sounding solution: Charge fair-market prices for curb parking. Use the meter revenue to pay for services and enhancements in the neighborhoods that generate it. Eliminate off-street parking requirements.

Cities are starting to listen. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Redwood City, Glendale, Ventura, Portland, Ore., and the District of Columbia are among those implementing or contemplating changes to hew more closely to Shoup’s vision. In an informal poll last year on Planetizen, a planning-related website, Shoup placed 15th on a list of the Top 100 Urban Thinkers. Jacobs, the late New York urbanist known for organizing grass-roots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods, was No. 1.

“It’s really remarkable how he has become the godfather of this parking idea,” said Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton, who as a UCLA planning student in 1982 took Shoup’s class on public resource economics.

“Don has been saying the exact same thing for 40 years, and finally the world is listening to him.”

Fulton, in fact, said he recently became a full-fledged Shoupista when Ventura implemented a Shoup-style parking management program and quickly saw the intended results. By charging for 400 of the 2,900 public parking spaces downtown, the city has spurred employees of local businesses to park at free city lots and walk to work rather than use curb spaces needed by customers.

Starting in mid-September, Ventura’s meter rates were set at $1 an hour for the first two hours and $1.50 for each hour after that, with the aim of achieving 85% occupancy. Put another way, 85% occupancy — which Shoup considers ideal — would leave one or two open spaces per block. The city said it plans to adjust rates as needed. If parking use drops below 80%, the prices will be lowered until the 85% goal is achieved.

Fulton headed out to get a cup of coffee the morning the program went into effect and wrote in a blog posting: “Only 30 minutes after we instituted the parking management program, it is working.”

Born in 1938 in Long Beach, Shoup was 2 when his father, who was in the Navy, moved the family to Hawaii. Home movies taken after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor show 3-year-old Don wearing a gas mask decorated with a Mickey Mouse image.

A radio shaped like a parking meter sits in Shoup’s cluttered office on campus. Tomes about parking garages and land use line the shelves of his home office, behind the Spanish-style house in Westwood he shares with his wife, Pat.

Partial to khaki-colored suits and tattersall shirts, Shoup holds four degrees from Yale University, including a doctorate in economics. He has directed the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA and chaired the university’s urban planning department.

His earlier work led to passage in 1992 of California’s parking cash-out law, which requires many employers who offer free parking at work to offer commuters the option to take the cash value of a free parking space in exchange for not using a space.

In 1997, Shoup studied eight employers in the L.A. area and found that cash-out programs reduced solo driving to work by 17%. Transit use increased by 50% and carpooling increased by 64%. A bill now in Congress would extend California’s requirement nationwide.

Not everyone subscribes to Shoup’s theories. He recently sparred online with Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute known for his website, The Antiplanner, dedicated to “the sunset of government planning.”

“I am an economist, and as long as Dr. Shoup is thinking like an economist … our thinking coincides,” O’Toole wrote in an e-mail. “It is when he starts thinking like an urban planner, trying to change people’s behavior and in particular trying to reduce driving, that we have a problem. … Mobility is valuable, and any limits placed upon it harm people and the economy.”

Shoup depends on his bicycle for much of his mobility. He freely confesses, however, that when behind the wheel of his silver 1994 Infiniti J30, he often circles the block looking for a free parking space. “I don’t like paying for parking,” he says with a shrug. “But free parking is ultimately not beneficial.”

It’s the conclusion more planners are reaching.

“There’s a sense in a lot of places that parking policy has gone disastrously wrong,” said Patrick Siegman, a principal with Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, a transportation planning firm in San Francisco. “As people think about it from scratch again, they’re realizing that a lot of old ideas have been a huge failure.”

Shoup considers Siegman the first Shoupista.

He was a student at Stanford circa 1992 when he first discovered Shoup’s monographs in the Green Library stacks. “Because of that experience, I decided to become an economics major, and wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the economics of parking,” Siegman said. “When I graduated in 1994, I became a transportation planner and started trying to put his principles into practice.”

At a recent meeting of the Glendale Transportation and Parking Commission, Bonnie Nelson, a co-founder of Nelson\Nygaard, followed Shoup as speaker and cited him chapter and verse.

“Don is treated in some places like Einstein, like he has discovered the theory of relativity,” Nelson said.

In Shoup’s view, Old Pasadena and Westwood Village illustrate the effects of different parking policies. In 1993, Old Pasadena installed $1-an-hour meters and began using the revenue to spruce things up. Many area employees who had parked on the street and moved their vehicles every two hours began to pay for parking in city structures, so that curb spaces were freed for customers. The shift helped transform the area from a blighted eyesore into a vibrant destination with shops and restaurants. Shoup doesn’t take credit for Old Pasadena’s change, but he often uses the area as Exhibit A in his talks.

That same year, Shoup said, merchants in Westwood petitioned the city to cut meter rates from $1 an hour to 50 cents. Curb parking was underpriced and overcrowded, and the meter money flowed into the city’s general fund rather than back to the area. Today, Westwood Village residents and merchants bemoan the cracked, trash-strewn sidewalks, neglected landscaping and numerous vacancies.

To Shoup, the matter comes down to a simple question: “Would you rather have free parking and dirty sidewalks or paid parking and clean sidewalks?”

martha.groves@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Food @fps.com continues.
On Friday, October 15, 2010, at 7PM, in  Harvard’s Center for European Studies at 27 Kirkland St,  we will show  Louis de Funes’  L’Aile Ou La Cuisse

The film will be introduced by Tom Conley of Harvard University and Chef Raymond Ost of Sandrine Restuarant on Holyoke St. in Harvard Square.

An unknown great De Funes
6 March 2010 | by semiotechlab-658-95444 (United States) – See all my reviews

After having landed a world-success with Gerard Oury’s “The mad adventures of Rabbi Jacob” (1975), Louis De Funes suffered his first severe heart attack. Nevertheless, only one year later, he starred in another great success: “The Wing or the Thigh” (1976). However, while Rabbi Jacob became world-famous and is since long available as one the deplorably very few De Funes movies on DVD, “L’Aile Ou La Cuisse” never reached the stardom of his predecessor. About the reasons one can only speculate. So, De Funes suggested to put Coluche’s name on the advertisements posters, Coluche who plays De Funes’ son and was one of the greatest French stars of comedy, circus, TV and politics – but unknown to a greater audience outside of France. Moreover, the topic of this movie is the beginning of “Convenience Food” (so the official term) in France in the mindst-70ies. In the US, however, frozen food in the form of “TV dinners” and other convenient forms of thawing or reheating pasteurized meals had already a long tradition at that time. Obviously, the producers were afraid that “L’Aile Ou La Cuisse” would not be understood outside of Europe. But nevertheless, Louis De Funes, although pale-looking and quieter than in his earlier works, can show all registers of his gigantic comic talent in this movie. In Coluche, he has a quite non-fitting partner, but one who was wise enough not to upstage De Funes, but to persuade with his soft or even tacit humor. As usual for all De Funes movies, the plot is coherent and convincing from A to Z, the topic is still not dusty, because meanwhile our world has been over-rolled by successors of Monsieur Tricatel from the movie, and Louis De Funes is, as he ever was, the most sympathetic heroic anti-hero, bourgeois anti-bourgeois and military anti-militarist how he can perhaps only exist in France.

More information is available about the series at

http://www.food24fps.com/

M.I.T.’s Makeover for the 21st Century

By SUSAN DIESENHOUSE

The flavors change frequently.  This is what we have at 1PM on We O 13 2010
WE CLOSE AT 11PM.

Aaron is studying at home.

French Vanilla
Belgian Chocolate
B3
Burnt Caramel
Ginger
Rum Raisin
Grape Nut Raisin
Espresso
Mango
Coconut
Balsamic Fig
Malted Vanilla
Gianduia
Mocha
Goat Cheese Brownie
Khulfee
Green Tea Kit Kat
Coffee Ice Cream Sandwich
Creamsicle
Bourbon Vienna Finger Cookie
Chocolate Chip
Raspberry Chip
Almond Rose
Salty Caramel
Ginger Snap Molasses
Hydrox Cookie
Sweet Cream
Coconut Sorbet
Strawberry Sorbet

David Shaw was one of the fifteen people who could fairly describe himself as our first employee.  He was certainly the first employee who got paid.  Everyone else, and I now think they numbered in the dozens, were doing good deeds, and making an effort to get me off the street.  Their kindness was staggering.

David Shaw went to MIT after graduating from Fordham Prep in the Bronx.   He worked on The Tech, MIT’s newspaper, and loved music like that schoolboy in Tina Turner’s version of River Deep Mountain High.  He was the first person I knew to pick up on very early rap, perhaps because of his Bronx origins.  He also hated the band The Police for being a lightweight more popular ripoff of The Talking Heads.  Eventually he convinced me of David Byrne’s momentary genius, and Grandmaster Flash’s cultural importance.

He has written a cute memory of what Main Street was like before Polaroid left and the neighborhood shifted sideways.  Colleen’s was a Chinese restaurant which occupied the site where The Royal East is today.  David notes that the very Irish name for a Chinese restaurant was anomalous.  But so was the Spanish name La Groceria for the Italian red sauce restaurant at the corner of Bishop Allen St. and Main.  Of course Bishop Allen was Austin Street then.  And La Groceria was everyone’s first restuarant, for years.  Salt’s at 905 Main Street presently occupies the good restaurant spot on that side of the street which was inaugurated by Bruce Frankel’s Panache, which became 905 Main Street, and then turned into  Bob Calderone’s Anago Bistro.    Anago moved across the Charles to Back Bay and Bob now runs a restaurant on The Cape.  Then the restuarant space became Salt, and the name remains under Chef Gabriel Bremer.  Whee.

Across the street was Twin Donuts which I loved and the street also had the wonderful Polaroid Gallery.  It was possible to get an excellent donut in the morning, make ice cream and at any time during the day see world-class photography.

http://blog.belm.com/2010/01/05/whole-lotta-umami/

ColumbusDayHolidayWeekend

We will be serving our full breakfast on Saturday Oc 9 from 10AM to 2PM
and
on Mo Oc 11 from 10AM to 1PM.
On Sunday we will serve our lighter Bagel Bar menu.
We will close every night at our usual time, 11PM

In his magisterial Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison writes:

(Christopher Columbus did) more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. Yet the life of the Admiral closed on a note of frustration. He had not found the Strait, or met the Grand Khan, or converted any great number of heathen, or regained Jerusalem. He had not even secured the future of his family. And the significance of what he had accomplished was only slightly less obscure to him than to the chroniclers who neglected to record his death, or to the courtiers who failed to attend his modest funeral at Valladolid. The vast extent and immense resources of the Americas were but dimly seen; the mighty ocean that laved their western shores had not yet yielded her secret