Food

October 28, 2008

Burritos for Barack

Nate Silver, the statistician behind FiveThirtyEight.com and Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA has recently become something of media phenomenon. But while some have suggested that PECOTA's pre-season embrace of the Rays (who were dismissed by most analysts) augurs good news for Barack Obama (whom Silver projects to win the Presidency by a near-landslide margin), we can't help but wonder if another, lesser-known, exploit of Silver's can help to predict his predicting acumen. We are referring, of course, to his ability to find the best taqueria in Chicago's Wicker Park.

Burrito photo courtesy of metalcowboy's Flickr stream.

Last year, Silver, who once used the name of a chile pepper for a blogging pseudonym, started The Burrito Bracket, an endearingly quasi-scientific attempt to find the best burrito in his neighborhood. The site organized the taquerias into seeds, NCAA-style, with Silver eliminating one each until he determined a winner.

Silver's effort was eerily reminiscent of San Francisco's Burritoeater, whom Gelf interviewed in 2006. Of course the Burritoeater is a more comprehensive site, focusing on an entire city rather than one or two neighborhoods, though it lacks Silver's tourney-style bracketology. As such, there is no "winner," just highly rated taquerias based on the site's 10-Mustache Rating Scale.

So who won the Burrito Bracket? Nobody. The site has not been updated since November 2007, and the Final Four is still undetermined.

Because we consider it unlikely that Silver will suddenly forsake FiveThirtyEight for Mexican food, let's take a look at three taquerias that have survived the competition. (We sent Silver an email for comment, but he has yet to get back to us.)

La Pasadita, Silver's first seed, received an 8.8 ("highly recommended") on Burritophile, and five stars on Citysearch Chicago. El Taco Veloz, the second seed, received a 7 on Burritophile ("recommended"), and De Pasada, the fourth seed, received 4.5 stars on Yelp. Public sentiment seems to agree with Silver's intuitions, and his numbers (yes, there are numbers), at least in the realm of Mexican food.

Does this herald a big win for Barack Obama? Taken together with the 2008 American League Champion Tampa Bay Rays, it couldn't hurt.

Food

August 24, 2008

Wine Spectator Sells Its Credibility

Wine Spectator magazine is apparently in the business of handing out "Awards of Excellence" to restaurants with good wine lists—including fake ones. Writer Robin Goldstein proved this by making up a restaurant in Milan, complete with a website, phony menu, and reviews on Chowhound. He then wrote up a wine list, and submitted it to Wine Spectator for consideration, along with the $250 application fee. He won the award, despite the fact that the restaurant, Osteria l’Intrepido, does not exist, and, perhaps more damning, the wine list was not very good.

Media

July 16, 2008

Outsourcing Bad Beer

Once again, jingoism and the flailing economy collide. The most prolific and steadily unappetizing macrobrew distiller in America, Anheuser-Busch, has agreed to a $52 billion takeover offer from Belgian-based, Brazilian-operated InBev this week, thus adding itself to the list of things-available-to-but-no-longer-of America. Think tech support, celebrity childbirth, and Madonna.

Food

July 9, 2007

When Fake Food Becomes Fact

This past weekend, to promote the upcoming Simpsons Movie, 7-Eleven transformed a dozen of its stores in various parts of the country into full-fledged Kwik-E-Marts, the convenience store from the TV show. While these stores will go back to being 7-Elevens soon, several other stores first seen in television and movies have been reified as lasting tributes to the fiction that inspired them.

Media

May 2, 2007

The Food is Great, But You Suck

The next time you dine out in Manhattan or Brooklyn, beware. A New Yorker writer may be surreptitiously jotting down your mannerisms and bloviations in preparation for passing judgment on you in the front pages of his rag. That's because the magazine's relatively brief food reviews often devote as much space to eavesdropping on whoever happens to be in a restaurant the same night as the critic, as to the food itself. Here are a few examples from some recent Tables for Two reviews.

Food

July 19, 2005

One Lucky Neighborhood

People toss the term "neighborhood restaurant" around lightly, but the folks at Frankies 457 in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens take it seriously. Luckily for everyone, they know what they're doing.