London, on the other hand

Prêt à Manger - 2 stars
Everywhere

EAT - 1 star
Everywhere

Marks & Spencer - 1 star
Everywhere

Stick and Bowl - 2 stars
31, Kensington High Street, W8

Foubert's - 0 stars
17 Kensington High Street, W8

As opposed to Paris, London is a city I remember fondly, although for no good reason. I first visited in 1993, when my girlfriend and I stayed with my sister for a week near Earl's Court and saw the tourist sites. I spent three weeks there in 1996, taking a summer course at the LSE that was trivially easy and living in a dorm on the South Bank across from the Tower of London, and my favorite memories are of running along the Thames, back before my knee broke down during my one and only marathon. But the longest time I spent there was a truly miserable experience, six weeks of a brutal McKinsey study in 1998 working until late at night six or seven days per week, and the kind of pressure that gave me panic attacks for the first time in my life, and living in the Royal Horseguards hotel near Whitehall. (When I left, the bill was well over $10,000, including hundreds of dollars for laundry.) The love of my life visited me for two weeks, and I spent almost no time with her, but I did ask her to marry me one evening in the Victoria Embankment Gardens, and she hugged me and said yes. I believe I went to the office later that night.

So I don't know why London is a city I always look forward to seeing (I've been back a half dozen times since then on various business trips), and why it's even a place I would like to live. (Of course, I realize that I will live in very few of the places where I would like to live.)

This trip was undoubtedly one of the worst, as I was sick for all three days, progressing through the various stages of a severe cold, including sniffling my way through a full-day meeting and a miserable flight back home. But still it was momentarily invigorating to swim in the diverse sea of busy commuters, and to look in at all the wonderful things to buy and eat in a real city, and to imagine what it would be like to be there every day.

This time I was staying in a hotel just off Kensington High Street and across from the Kensington Gardens, an area thickly populated with restaurants. But being sick the whole time, I confined myself to takeaway and casual places. Luckily, London has a restaurant category that is so good and so obvious that I wish we had it in the US: the high-quality, fresh-food cafeteria pioneered (I think) by Prêt à Manger and since copied by many other chains. Prêt was my favorite place to eat back in 1998, in part because I could get more or less as many things as I wanted and still stay within a reasonable expense limit. (Looking back on my McKinsey days, I should have spent and expensed much, much more than I did.) I ate once at Prêt and once at EAT, and each time I had one of those quintessentially English sandwiches, mature cheddar with pickle (which is not what you think of when you hear the word "pickle"), and they were both reassuringly familiar.

My other discovery was a Chinese hole-in-the-wall called Stick and Bowl, where people are densely packed into communal bar-type seating and they make all the standards, with a slight tendency toward Cantonese cuisine, and they bring them to you fast. The spring roll was grayish on the inside (though tasty), but the sautéed bok choy with garlic sauce was just right, and the vegetable noodle soup was the closest thing to chicken soup that I would eat these days. If only we had such a place back home.

The last day I had a couple hours in the morning before I had to leave for Heathrow (which was itself an adventure, since the Heathrow Express was shut down and I had to take a cab instead). I thought about swinging by Victoria Embankment Gardens and ... what would I do? Take a picture of the spot where we got engaged? Instead I had herbal tea and a scone at the Marks & Spencer cafe, took a walk in Kensington Gardens, and sat on a bench and watched the dogs (almost as cute as the Parisian ones) until it was time to go. It was cool but brilliantly sunny, and apart from missing my family I wished time would stop.

Paris, again, again

Cafe Guitry - 1 star
10, place Edouard VII, 75009

Luna di Miele - 0 stars
49, passage Choiseul, 75002

Wadja - 3 stars
10, rue de la Grande-Chaumiere, 75006

Tresor du Kashmir - 0 stars
rue de la Michodiere, 75002

Santi - 1 star
49, rue Montorgueil, 75002

Regular readers of this blog (of which there may be one or two) know about my complex relationship with the city of Paris. I was just there for six days, and this time I was determined not to repeat the usual tour of my favorite places to eat, and in fact I succeeded in not visiting Denfert, or going to any Left Bank patisseries.

However, my company's new Paris office is actually just two blocks from the old Bibliotheque Nationale (BN), or national library, which is where I spent most weekdays back when I lived in Paris thirteen years ago. so the trip was not without its share of nostalgia. The first night I was there I ate with my friend Alex at the same Italian restaurant in the northwest corner of the funny little road that surrounds the Palais Royal gardens where I used to eat with my old friend Peter. (Back then Peter was a love-struck graduate student in German history who lived in Paris to be with his French girlfriend; now he's a tenured professor at Harvard.) I had a pizza with capers and anchovies, which was quite good, the crust nicely blackened the way I like it. And just before I left the city we went to the Cafe San Jose on the rue des Petits Champs, just around the corner from both the office and the BN, and it was just as crowded and friendly as ever.

In between, though, I had two of the nicer days I've had in Paris in a long time. On Saturday I got together with Jay (then: impoverished graduate student like the rest of us; now: MacArthur fellowship-winning professor of French medieval history) to drink kirs in his rented 17th-century apartment on the Ile St. Louis, see an old Fritz Lang movie in Action Ecoles in the 5th, drink French beer at a cafe in the 6th, and eat a very nice dinner (and drink a bottle of wine) at Wadja. I had a somewhat overbearing sardine tarte, a wonderful filet of bar (I always forget how to translate names of fish), and what did I have for dessert again? Anyway, it was great. And the best part (ok, maybe not the best part) was being able to pay the 120+ euro bill (we split it) without blinking. (For those from my company reading, I didn't expense it.) Who says money can't buy happiness?

On Sunday, I took my friends Alex and Sigrid (newcomers who are staying in Paris for six months) around the city with the general mandate of avoiding major tourist sites (minor tourist sites were ok). The undisputed high point of my entire trip, surpassing even the pilgrimage to Berthillon, was lying on one of the hills of the Buttes-Chaumont on a perfect day (completely sunny, temperature around 70) and watching the unbelievably cute Parisian dogs playing with (bothering) their people. ("Come on, let's play! Oh, you have food? I need some food. Why don't you give me some food? OK, I'll go over here and ask these nice people. Hey! Why did you put that leash on? I don't want to lie down! OK, I'll lie down ...") So maybe you don't need money to be happy.

Overall the food probably wasn't up to my usual Parisian standards. It included several mediocre croissants from the bakeries between my hotel and the office (which, of course, are still better than any croissant you can buy in the US), a few trips to passable lunch spots near the office that cater to business people (at one of which they microwaved the pesto before our eyes before spooning it on the pasta), a two-hour "business lunch" (preceded by a five-minute meeting) at the Cafe Guitry with a partner of ours (tarte pissaladiere and marmite de poisons, both decent), a so-so Indian restaurant near the office, a nice, modern lunch place on the rue Montorgeuil, and a sushi place near the hotel that would go out of business in San Francisco in a matter of weeks. But in the end I think what I like the most about being in Paris - or any other foreign city where I've lived - is the feeling of actually living there, and doing the ordinary things that people who live there do. And this time, commuting to the office each morning, going to a movie, and lying in the grass of the Buttes Chaumont, I had more of that feeling than I have since 1994.

Who's the entrepreneur?

I wrote this on an impulse because I was enraged by an article in The New York Times about VCs posturing as entrepreneurs. Of course, the Times didn't print it (they get a thousand submissions for everything they publish), so enjoy.

***

As an entrepreneur, I was surprised to read the title "Entrepreneurs Defend a Tax Benefit Despite a Dubious Congress" (V. C. Nation, Sept. 21), and offended to learn that venture capitalists are posing as entrepreneurs in order to protect their anomalous tax treatment. VCs, as we call them, may like to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are no such thing. Even associates fresh out of business school make six-figure salaries, and partners' base salaries are considerably higher - funded, of course, by the 2% asset management fee they charge their investors.

The ongoing debate, of course, concerns the "carry," or the share of investment gains that they keep for themselves, and whether it should be taxed as ordinary income or a capital gain. On the face of it, I fail to see how anyone could argue that this constitutes a capital gain, since the capital at risk is not theirs to begin with. A sophist might argue that the carry is deducted from the investors' capital gains, and hence should be treated that way for tax purposes ... but that's the same as arguing that when you sell stock for a gain, your broker should pay capital gains tax on his commission, because it comes out of your gain.

But leaving aside that well-trodden ground, the claim that VCs deserve their tax break because of the "sweat equity" that they invest in their portfolio companies, and the jobs that those companies create, is a bit much. VCs do play an important role in allocating capital - my company would not exist without them - but so do research analysts, mutual fund managers, equity underwriters, and traders, all of whom pay ordinary income tax.

Once the capital is allocated, many successful entrepreneurs - who no longer need to play nice with VCs - would describe the ongoing assistance they receive as ... well, "incidental" would be a nice way to put it. (One of the most candid VC partners I met once said, when asked what his role was, "we provide the money.") But even in the cases where they do provide valuable assistance, why should that work be taxed at a lower rate than the work done by every employee who helps the company grow and succeed?

On September 14, 2001, I quit my job to found a software company with five friends. We earned nothing for six months until we acquired funding, and then took large pay cuts from our previous salaries until the company was self-sustaining. Today, our company has more than 350 highly skilled, highly paid employees (the vast majority in the United States), and has created hundreds more jobs among our partners and customers.

It is true that those jobs would not exist without the initial backing we received from VC firms. But aside from the function of allocating other people's capital, which does not in itself merit capital gains treatment, I would defy any VC to argue that he played a greater role in creating those jobs than did I, or any other founder, or any one of fifty other important people in the company - and all of us pay ordinary income tax on our salaries.

In general, I fail to see why the contributions of capital toward growth and job creation are more valuable than the contributions of labor. As a result, although the lower tax rate on capital gains benefits me as a part-owner of my company, I don't see why it should exist. But given that it does exist, for VCs to argue that the labor they put into their portfolio companies is so much more valuable than the labor of the employees that their labor (and not ours) should be taxed as if it were capital is both nonsensical (should firefighters pay capital gains tax on their salaries because they are crucial to society? should teachers?) and insulting to the people who really build those companies.

St. Paul, MN

Mickey's - 1 star
St. Paul, Minnesota

Pazzaluna - 1 star
St. Paul, Minnesota

A year and a half ago I wrote about my favorite airport restaurant, which happens to be in the Minnesota-St. Paul airport, where I find myself at the moment and plan to eat dinner in an hour or so. I arrived two days ago for a sales call in St. Paul. The last time I came here (other than to eat in the airport) was in the winter of 2003, John R. and I rode the roller-coaster in the Mall of America and visited the ice sculptures in the little downtown park. This time the temperatures were in the 90s and a bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed.

Marcus was on this trip, too, and I have to admit I take a curious pleasure in getting together with him to talk about the company, life, our futures, and so on. On Tuesday night we chose for our digressions a truly old-school diner called Mickey's, a kind of St. Paul classic, which occupies a (fake?) freight car parked just a block or two from the center of downtown. Mickey's is so old school they haven't even heard of the tuna melt yet (which Marcus wanted). Instead, he had an omelet and home fries, and I had a fried cod sandwich and home fries. Although it was cooked in half a stick of butter, Marcus thought the omelet was excellent, and my fish fillet was surprisingly good, too: crisp, not soggy, on the outside, and light and tender on the inside.

Last night we went to dinner with the client at Pazzaluna, one of the fancy restaurants on the comically short downtown strip in St. Paul. Pazzalua is a slightly nouveau version of any other modern Italian restaurant, with higher prices, smaller portions, and slightly more sophisticated food. I had gnocchi with tomato sauce, which was about what you would expect, and a side dish of broccoli rabe sauteed with onions and anchovies, which was pretty good but much too salty. The antipasto was mixed, with good grilled asparagus (but who can't grill asparagus?) and onions but relatively pedestrian olives and cherry tomatoes.

The meetings were a cross-section of the sales experience: a lot of time poring over spreadsheets to refine project estimates, some cordial discussions that felt like pre-negotiation posturing, an executive meet-and-greet, and a last-minute 90-degree (or 180-degree?) change in direction that left us scratching our heads. It goes without saying that in sales you have to learn to expect anything and remain calm in all circumstances, or you will die young of heart disease. And it also goes without saying that the amount of effort you put in bears no relationship to the distance to the finish line. Remember those two things and you will never be disappointed.

Mexican airport food

Andale, SFO - 1 star

Qdoba, PIT - 0 stars

Tequileria, CLT - 1 star

Even the airport food is better in California. Those who fly through San Francisco will have noticed the market upgrade (in both quality and price) of the SFO restaurants in the last few years. The sushi place, the Chinese place, and the Italian place are all decent, but my favorite is probably Andale, the Mexican place in both Terminals 1 and 3 that is actually a branch of a restaurant I've eaten at in the Marina in San Francisco itself.

This time I had a vegetarian burrito (for $9.85!), which was basic but well done, with cilantro rice, black beans, guacamole, and salsa. What was especially impressive (for an airport) was the side salad, made with fresh romaine lettuce and, among other things, surprisingly good chunks of avocado.

I've been spending a lot of time in airports lately. One of the worst flights I know is the 6 am flight (with a connection) from Hartford to San Francisco, which requires waking up at 4 Eastern time. Two days ago I woke up at 4 to catch a 6.15 flight through Pittsburgh (Qdoba egg and potato breakfast burrito, not bad but still 0 stars) to San Francisco, went to the office, and worked until 8 pm Pacific time (nineteen hours later). The only flight worse than that is the redeye back from San Francisco (with a connection in the morning), because if you fall asleep you get at best four hours of sleep, and if you're in coach like I was you don't really sleep at all. Last night I took a redeye back home, through Charlotte (where there's a decent "Mexican" restaurant called Tequileria at the base of C concourse - hash browns beaten with eggs and cheese and baked, topped with a fresh salsa of tomatoes, scallions, and fresh lime juice - 1 star, but not as good as the Andale breakfasts, which are better than their burritos). I did the same thing last week (except through Dulles instead). And the week before I flew to California for four days, although I didn't take either the 6 am or the redeye.

My company is going through interesting times. In the last month our CEO "retired" and our vice president of North American sales resigned; three months ago our CFO announced that he would be retiring as well, and a search is on for his successor. These events brought to a close a strange eighteen-month interlude in my company's history, when a set of "experienced senior executives" was brought in by our VC backers to "take the company to the next level." As if, as Buffy might say.

The net result is that I and the close group of thirtysomething friends I founded the company with six years ago (when half of us were in their twenties) are once again running the company the way we want to - only now with a crush of additional work to do. Hence the three consecutive weeks of flying to California - and I may be going back next week again.

Flying to California is something I did a lot of in the early days, when the whole company was there and we had no or few customers to tend to. The current experience emotionally reminiscent of those years, when we got together as a team to work on all the major issues facing the company, before growth in multiple dimensions spread us out. The 6.15 US Airways flight to Pittsburgh, the one I took last week, and the Pittsburgh airport as a whole remind me of the many months I took that flight to work on our first customer project, when it was still unclear that anyone would ever use our software for real. Redeyes back home are something I did a lot in the beginning, when I spent every other week in California, but swore off a few years ago; as recently as this spring I even went two months without getting on a plane - the longest stretch in six years.

But more than anything else it's that feeling of pressure, adrenaline, and exhaustion you get when you're starting a company and spending half your time in the wrong time zone, but that fades away as the company grows and becomes more and more like every other company in the world. The last few weeks have reminded me that we're not like every other company in the world. And that a small group of people who care and work hard can make a difference, even if it's just in the business world. Is that enough to compensate for the physical pain and the time away from my 10-month-old daughter? Probably not. But it's something.

Paris, again

Berthillon - 3 stars
29, rue St. Louis en l'Ile, 75004

La Chope Daguerre - 1 star
17, rue Daguerre, 75014

Gérard Mulot - 3 stars
76, rue de Seine, 75006

Bistrot du Dôme - 2 stars
rue Delambre, 75014

Poilâne- 3 stars
8, rue du Cherche-Midi, 75006

As I get older, I seem to spend more and more of my time trying to recapture moments and sensations from my past. I was just in Paris for three days on a business trip, and on the first evening I walked through the drizzle to Denfert-Rochereau, the neighborhood I lived in during the summer of 1993 and most of 1994. Denfert is a generally unexceptional neighborhood, with few attractions and virtually no tourists, and few Parisians would spend time there unless they lived there. And yet I visit at least once every time I go back to Paris. I walked around the old streets, paused to look up at the shutters of my old apartment, and ate dinner in one of the local brasseries - tuna in a sauce with capers, asparagus, carrots, and white rice, preceded by a green salad. The tuna was overcooked and generally mediocre, but the salad, while decidedly average for France, was better than at most restaurants in the United States - soft, almost velvety lettuce, lightly coated in real French dressing (olive oil, vinegar, and a little mustard as an emulsifier - not the stuff sold under that name in bottles in the U.S.). Then I walked back to my hotel.

Why did I visit Denfert? What was I hoping would happen? I have little desire to relive my time as a graduate student in Paris. I didn't realize it then, but looking back I realize that I was depressed a lot of the time, although there were certainly days that I was happy, especially at the beginning when everything was new and exciting. Why do I visit Berthillon for the wild strawberry sorbet (which I have sometimes described as the best food in the world), and a list of other places, every time I go back to Paris? I'm obviously trying to capture the feeling of an earlier moment in my life, to bring back to life a distant memory, although often those memories are more bitter than sweet. Denfert is where I lived when I was depressed; Berthillon is where I went with the longtime girlfriend I didn't marry, to sit on a bench and look across the river at the Tour d'Argent, a famous (and, by published reports, not so good) restaurant we could never afford to eat at. I looked in the window at La Maison du Miel, where you can taste more than twenty different flavors of honey (differentiated by the flowers among which the bees are raised), where my girlfriend and I used to go; but I didn't go in, because I never eat honey these days.

I have no desire to go back. I am pretty certain that I have never been happier, at least not as an adult, than I am now, with a wonderful family (my wife and I haven't had a fight in almost ten years) and almost the best job I could imagine in the business world. Maybe I just long to be younger again. Or maybe those memories are precious even though they come from a less happy time of my life, simply because they are part of me. I even find myself longing for the memories that are gone forever - like the first day I set foot in Paris, back in 1991, or the first day I spent there with my girlfriend in 1993, or the first day I visited with my wife in 2003. But in any case, each time I go back to Paris, I find myself retracing the same steps, and wondering why.

One of the places I always go is Poilâne, which makes by reputation the best bread in the world. I went there my first morning in Paris, to get the usual - a croissant au beurre (why anyone in France ever gets a croissant ordinaire I have no idea) and a tartelette aux pommes (small apple tart). While they are good, they are not as exceptional as the complex, dark, crusty sourdough pain Poilâne for which they are famous, and which is perhaps even better than the sourdough from Acme Bread in Berkeley.

I always go to Gérard Mulot, near the Eglise St.-Sulpice, in the Paris neighborhood where I would love to live - assuming I knew anyone in Paris - and where the desserts, if not that much better than anywhere else (the most ordinary patisserie in Paris can make a strawberry tart that you cannot find in the United States except at a handful of bakeries run by French people or a handful of very expensive restaurants), is at least as good as you will find anywhere. This time I had a raspberry tart, which was sublime, and an orange tart, which was actually too sweet and a bit too dense for an overmatched crust.

This time I ate dinner at the Bistrot du Dôme, the (slightly) cheaper sibling to the Dôme, a famous seafood restaurant on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where the salad of arugula and grilled langoustines was spectacular, while the grilled daurade (I can never translate the names of fish) was simply very good, its tender white flesh flaking away from the bones just the way it is supposed to.

I ate at some other places, but they don't really deserve mention, except for the bizarre cone-shaped pizza I ate in the Charles de Gaulle airport waiting for my flight home (which was, surprisingly enough, quite good).

Someday I will go back to Paris with my daughter and take her to all the places I remember, and perhaps we'll find someplace new to visit.

Moscow

April 22-25, 2006

Correa's - 2 stars
Ordynka ulitsa 40

Soup Cafe - 1 star
1-ya Brestskaya 62

Teremok - 1 star
many locations

There are, of course, many ways in which the glamour of international business travel is a far cry from the reality. One of the more mundane, though painful, is hunger.

Right now I'm flying from Moscow to Atlanta (twelve hours) with a connection to San Francisco (5 hours). If everything goes smoothly from here the door-to-door trip will be 23 hours. It's 10 pm Moscow time, and so far today I've eaten a Clif Bar and a bad old airline lunch (the kind you used to get, with a hot entree wrapped in aluminum foil, but that has been replaced on domestic flights by slightly less mediocre food you pay for). This one had a few pasta shells in a green pesto-like sauce that didn't taste at all like pesto, a tiny wilted salad with a thick, sweet "vinaigrette," a small piece of that dark and spongy bread people eat in Russia, and a small piece of cheese wrapped in aluminum foil.

So, how did I get here? John and I got up at 7 (I was actually woke up by 4 for the third straight morning because of jet lag) and left the hotel at 7.30 to get to the client by 8.10. The hotel bar/cafe was closed. We took the Metro, and making a detour for breakfast was tough because of our luggage and our inability to order in Russian from one of the carts outside the Metro stop. so it was another case of prioritizing sleep over breakfast. At 9.40 I got in a taxi for the airport (typically 30-45 minutes) and promptly spent 45 minutes covering one mile. With numerous other jams, and despite the valiant efforts of my driver, who even drove backward in traffic at one point and drove in the left lane at another, the trip took 1:45, and I got to the airport an hour before my flight. After customs, check-in, passport control, and hand-checking of all carry-ons, I barely made my flight, and there was no time to eat anything. So here I am.

Peter and I were recently commiserating about this problem. There are many reasons you end up skipping meals: "sleep over breakfast," as I always say; simply too much work to each lunch; working too late to eat before your flight; delayed flights preventing you from eating during connections; the lack of restaurants in budget hotels; airport restaurants closing at 7 pm; and the poor or nonexistent options in airports, especially for vegetarians. So the net result is that for every good meal you eat in some exotic locale, you end up skipping five or six along the way, and most of the rest are mediocre (think Denny's and Subway).

Then there are places like Moscow, where most of the food is mediocre to begin with. Yesterday during the lunch break the client took us to Correa's, in their sparkling new building complex (with the nicest conference room I've presented in in the last five years), which is supposedly one of the best restaurants in Moscow. It's an Italian restaurant, of course, and it was, well, pretty good. I had a margherita pizza that was good on top but typically undercooked on the bottom, and John had a smoked salmon and red caviar pizza that tasted like, he said, smoked salmon and red caviar. For dinner we ate at Soup, a trendy basement place open 24 hours with lots of smoke, sullen waiters, and a "soft room" with comfy chairs and sofas and a 20% markup. (They could also have called it the "date room" or the "make-out room.") On the plus side, it had an extensive English-language menu (yeah, you try reading a Cyrillic menu in a language you don't understand with virtually no cognates with English or French) of soups and lots of other things, and a handy little symbol indicating what was vegetarian. I had borscht (hot - they had cold as well), which was excellent, and pasta with spinach pesto and red peppers, which was generally edible. John had a potato-leek-mussel soup that he liked, a veal sausage that wasn't so great, and Leffe (a Belgian beer), which he liked a lot.

The other reasonably satisfying food option was blini, thin pancakes either served on a plate with toppings, or folded in wedges around a filling to eat as a sandwich. After our 4-1/2-hour meeting on Saturday afternoon (Russian consultants work a lot more even than American ones), Sergey and Svetlana from our partner took us the Teremok located in the Okhotny Ryad underground shopping mall near the Kremlin, where I had a salmon and an apple blini (those are two separate things), and John had a red caviar and a ham and cheese. Neither was spectacular, and the salmon was pretty dry, though the apple one was vaguely like a French crepe.

Other than that the food was pretty miserable, even to the point where John and I decided that TGI Friday's was one of the more promising options near our hotel. And I have never, ever eaten at a TGI Friday's in the United States.

Paris, La Defense, Courbevoie

March 7-10, 2006

Lina's - 1 star
CNIT building, La Defense

La Brasserie du Faubourg - 0 stars
Courbevoie

L'Estivals - 2 stars
58, rue Montorgueil, 2eme

Poilane - 3 stars
8, rue du Cherche-Midi, 6eme

Cacao et Chocolat - 1 star
29, rue de Buci, 6eme

Au Vin des Rues - 2 stars
21, rue Boulard, 14eme

Berthillon - 3 stars
Ile St. Louis, 4eme

Gerard Mulot - 3 stars
76, rue de Seine 16eme

Perre Herme - 3 stars
72, rue Bonaparte, 6eme

It's amazing how much polite cheerfulness there is in the high-end retail sector in Paris. Everywhere you go you get a "bonjour monsieur" and a "je peux vous aider?," and then you get a "merci monsieur" when you hand over your money, another with your change, and another with your actual goods, all capped off with an "au revoir" and a "bonne journee" on the way out the door. Sometimes you even get the long forms, as in "je vous remercie" (that would be like saying "I thank you" instead of "thanks"), or "je vous souhaite une bonne journee" ("I wish you a good day"). All provided by perfectly dressed, thin French women with such cheerful smiles you feel like you really made their day just by buying a croissant. (Of course, the opposite is true of cafe waiters, who are almost exclusively men - is there a connection there?)

And all this in a city that I think no one would characterize as either particularly friendly or particularly happy. Looking back, it's clear to me now that I was depressed when I lived in Paris - not surprising, given that I was a graduate student with uncertain prospects, not a lot of money, and not many friends in the city besides other graduate students in similar circumstances, in a city whose architecture is always monotonous and gray and whose weather is the same for most of the year. So these days when I do go I try to place a premium on enjoying myself, which usually involves some combination of food and soccer, since Paris is where I first started watching professional soccer.

Plan A was to leave on Saturday (a Saturday night "stay" saves you about $1,000 in airfare), arrive late on Sunday afternoon, check in, and go straight to the Parc des Princes to watch PSG-OM (that's Paris-St. Germain vs. Olympique Marseille), one of the classic matches of the French soccer season. As it turns out, the match was moved to 4 PM for security reasons, and Marseille sent their reserve team in what was essentially a huge snub to PSG (and the reserves even managed a draw). More importantly, though, I moved my flight back by two days because my dog fell ill again.

As you may know, Dauber almost died last May from an acute attack of pancreatitis that required a stay in the ICU, and we only nursed him back to health by feeding him a few tablespoons of egg whites, potato, or boiled chicken every two hours (any more food at once and he would throw up). As recently as Sunday a week before I left, he was walking four miles a day (an hour in the morning, half an hour in the early afternoon, and an hour in the late afternoon.) But he threw up Tuesday, started throwing up regularly on Friday morning, couldn't even keep water down by the afternoon, and threw up green bile every few hours starting Friday evening. So at 3 AM we took him to the hospital so he could get an IV and pain medication. When we visited him on Saturday night he was stable but still weak, but it seemed likely that he would survive, and by Sunday evening he actually seemed angry to be there (the doctor reported that he kicked the food they offered him out of his cage). So we brought him home on Sunday night and took turns feeding him egg white and potato overnight.

By Monday morning, when I flew to Paris, it was clear that he would still be alive when I came back, and during the week I was away he got stronger and stronger, although he is still a long way from recovered. And so I began the fourth of five consecutive weeks of travel.

Because I missed PSG-OM, there was mainly just food for entertainment, although for the second year in a row I did manage to make my one trip to Europe during a Champions League week, which meant I could watch the last 20 minutes of Barcelona-Chelsea (the other 70 minutes were sacrificed to work) and a monumental goal by Ronaldinho, and most of the 4-0 clinic Lyon put on against PSV Eindhoven (DaMarcus Beasley's team, for those American fans). Watching real soccer, and hearing the sound of a soccer crowd, makes the variety we have in the U.S. seem slow, boring, and unimportant.

As for the food, I'll pass quickly over Tuesday, which I spent working in the hotel at La Defense, headlined by a passable tuna sandwich for lunch and a truly bad salade nicoise (beets? carrots?) for dinner at one of the omnipresent bar/bistro/brasserie/restaurants. The sales call was Wednesday afternoon, so lunch was a cafe sandwich (one of those times when it's tough to be a semi-vegetarian, because you can't eat the croque-monsieur for old time's sake). Tim, John, and I did have a moderately good dinner at L'Estivals on rue Montorgueil, the pedestrian zone just north of St. Eustache (at the west end of Les Halles), where the rouget with olive oil and basil was light and only slightly overcooked (although the tarte tatin was rather sloppy and had those inedible bits of the apple surrounding the core). Tim and John needed to rush off to the airport, so we didn't have time to find a more distinguished restaurant.

Thursday, though, was the day for making the tour of my favorite places. I began at Poilane with a croissant au beurre and a tartelette aux pommes. The best thing at Poilane is the bread, a pain au levain so dense and flavorful it makes everything else seem pale by comparison, even Acme in Berkeley (the second-best bread in the world), but the croissants do melt in your mouth like fresh butter (which, basically, is what they are). Cacao et Chocolat was actually disappointing this time - the hot chocolate too syrupy and sweet, the cake also sweet and rather uninspired.

I usually try to eat at least once in Denfert-Rochereau, my old neighborhood, at one of the restaurants I didn't go to as a student because I didn't have enough money. This time it was Au Vin des Rues, a very typical wine bar - small and moderately smoky (Paris seems less smoky in general than twelve years ago, which I guess is progress), where most of the people know each other, and with a menu heavily focused on meat - which is not so great if you don't eat land animals. (The salad with soft goat cheese even came with sliced duck breast.) The herring filets and the salad were hardly the best things I could have found for lunch in Paris, but they still exhibited the kind of care you have to pay a lot for in the U.S. - real French salad dressing (not that balsamic vinaigrette nonsense that is all the rage in the U.S.), buttery leaves of lettuce, etc.

After lunch, and a coffee break on the boulevard Montparnasse, I made my pilgrimage to Berthillon, whose sorbets count as my favorite food in the entire world - probably followed by the pizza in Naples, and bruschetta made the right way. They don't have wild strawberry until April, so I tried blood orange instead, and when it exploded on my tongue I decided I liked it even more than wild strawberry. Imagine the best blood orange you've ever had, and then imagine it about ten times as as concentrated, with enough sugar to balance its natural tartness. Per ounce, of course, you pay about 10 times as much as you do at Ben and Jerry's in the U.S., but it's entirely worth it.

The final stops were at Mulot for a wild strawberry tarte and at Herme for macaroons to bring home - chocolate, coffee, chocolate/coffee, rose petal, grapefruit, and passion fruit. The tarte was actually slightly disappointing because it didn't quite live up to my high hopes for it, but it still had that crust with pastry cream melting into it that you just don't find at home, at least not often.

There isn't much to say for Friday, which I spent flying home, except that the croissants you get in the train stations in Paris are better than any you can find in the U.S. (even in Berkeley), where they are uniformly too dry and too fluffy, and generally too much like bread. And Dulles finally has a passable place to eat, though it's a bit pricy - Vino e Volo, a wine bar with decent appetizers and snacks, and drinkable glasses of wine starting at $6, next to gate C4.

Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport: French Meadows Cafe

Grilled Cheese Sandwich - 2 stars
$6.99 with green salad
February 22, 2006

Every so often life surprises you. I just had the best meal I can remember having in an airport, on my layover flying back from Milwaukee, in the F concourse at MSP (which, in general, has very good food for an American airport). The French Meadows Cafe is an all- or mostly-organic sandwich shop (with assorted other things, like organic bananas, various pastries that look like they were designed by an unreconstructed tie-dye-wearing Berkeley hippie), and organic, shade-grown coffee. I was expecting my sandwich wrapped up in a bag to eat on the plane, but instead it came on a plate with a salad made from organic mixed lettuces and only a shade too much of the ubiquitous balsamic vinaigrette. (Did you know that in Italy, balsamic vinegar is rarely if ever used in salad dressing? But I digress.)

The sandwich itself was two thick slices of cheese layered around sliced tomato and what seemed like roasted red pepper strips, grilled between two slices of what claimed to be pain au levain and came reasonably close. Except for a bit too much of a sharp mustard, it was one of the best grilled cheese sandwiches I've ever had - not too cheesy, not too greasy, with a nice accent in the peppers and good character in the bread. It was almost a shame to hurry through the sandwich to catch my flight back home.

So why, you may ask, am I reviewing a grilled cheese sandwich? Well, I recently decided to stop eating land animals, including birds (although I am reserving an exception for anything cooked by my mother, because I can't bear to tell her). In a remarkable stroke of timing, I made this decision just before three consecutive weeks of sales calls in the South and Midwest (Louisville last week, Wisconsin this week, Des Moines next week), and then a fourth week in Paris, which I will have to spend eating nothing but bread, cheese, pastries, and sorbet at Berthillon (4 stars, if anything ever deserved it).

The sales call, like last week's, was about as much fun as a sales call can be: really nice people, good questions, no posturing, and further confirmation that they (meaning the entire industry out there) want what we've got. There are dark moments in any sales cycle, such as when the prospects insist on focusing on the tiny gaps in your product, they complain that it can't be implemented in six days, or the mammoth and universally-recognized company that pretends to be your partner competes against you, fails miserably due to a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and shoddy products, and finally goes and stabs you in the back out of desperation (but that's ok, because white-hot burning stab-them-in-the-guts-and-crank-out-their-entrails-with-a-food-mill hatred is a perfectly good motivator when you're tired, far from home, and cramped into a middle seat on an airplane with woefully inadequate legroom) ... but what was I talking about, anyway? Oh yes: today was a pretty good day, and I really liked these people.

Cambridge, MA: Bartley's

Mitt Romney Turkey Burger - 2 stars
about $9 with onion rings
January 25, 2006

Cambridge, MA: Pinocchio's
Chicken Parmigiano Sub - 2 stars
about $4 (small)
December 5, 2005

Worcester, MA: Crowne Plaza Hotel Room Service
Chipotle Chicken Sandwich - 1 star
about $8 with fries or fresh fruit
January 23, 2006

Worcester, MA: Prospect Cafeteria
Chicken Breast with Spinach and Roasted Tomato Sandwich - 0 stars
about $5

San Francisco Airport: Boudin Bakery
Turkey and Avocado Sandwich - 1 star
$7.75

One of the few redeeming characteristics of business travel is the occasional opportunity to visit people and places that you haven't seen in a while. On my last trip to Massachusetts in early December, I made sure to stop at Pinocchio's, the favored late-night haunt of my rooming group in college. The thin-crust pizza is still excellent - even better than the best substitute I can find in California, which is Gioia in Berkeley. The chicken parmigiano sub was not quite as good as the steak and cheese subs of my memory, but still one of the reasons to live in New England.

Of which there aren't many, as I recalled on this trip. On Monday morning, I woke up in my hotel near Logan to three inches of snow on my car and thick blankets of enormous snowflakes floating lazily down onto the roads, with 70 miles to drive to the prospect's offices over slushy roads partially blocked by accidents. The afternoon at the prospect was relatively uneventful - the chicken sandwich was one of those combinations that probably sounded good to someone who doesn't understand food very well (a lot of those in New England), but didn't realize that a few spinach leaves actually have no flavor, and roasted tomatoes are actually sour more than anything else.

The real adventure was that evening, when I had to buy a hub or switch for the next day. I set out for the Radio Shack that should have been 3 miles away, according to Google Maps. To summarize, the round trip took one hour and twenty minutes. First I got lost on the streets of central Worcester, but by driving in the general direction I needed I found Grafton St., which the Radio Shack was on. Then I drove into a rotary, took a guess at where to come out, went a quarter mile to a fork, guessesd at the left fork, drove for a couple miles, and turned around. Then I went through the rotary again, went out a different street, drove for a few miles, turned around, went back to the rotary, and asked for directions at a 7-11. Those directions took me back to the fork, so I stopped there and for directions in a pizza store. I must have misinterpreted those directions, because this time I took a right at the fork and drove about 5 miles before stopping at an intersection and asking for directions again. This time I got accurate directions to Radio Shack via a different route, found it, and bought my switch. However, because I didn't realize my current orientation, I now left Radio Shack the wrong way and drove away from Worcester for about 5 miles before stopping at a Dunkin' Donuts and asking for directions. Finally I arrived back in Worcester, drove slightly aimlessly through a few abandoned streets, and eventually found my hotel.

The only other time I can recall being significantly lost in the last five years was in downtown Lowell, Massachusetts, so I blame this on New England streets. On my analysis, the key issues are these:
1. Rotaries
2. Rotaries with unlabeled streets
3. Rotaries where a given named street (e.g., Grafton) enters at one end but is not the street that exits 180 degrees opposite (Hamilton in my case)
4. Winding roads in general
5. The general principle that at any intersection you only label the smaller street, so you can never find out what street you are currently on
6. Snow, which makes quick U-turns risky

I guess I'm just a Californian.

From a travel and dining perspective, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, apart from working past midnight every night, forgetting my favorite sweatpants and sweatshirt in the hotel in Worcester, and drinking so much green tea (by the way, in Worcester you need to bring your own green tea bags) that my hands were trembling most of the time I was presenting. The hotel's room service was surprisingly edible.

The highlight of the trip was dinner at Bartley's in Harvard Square on Wednesday night. Bartley's is a landmark, as they say - small, old, cash-only, frequented at one time or another by numerous luminaries, and packed, even on a Wednesday night between semesters. The Mitt Romney burger (can't stand the guy, actually) has Swiss cheese and grilled onions, and though it probably would have gotten 3 stars in its cow-based version, was still highly satisfying, and I even splurged on a strawberry frappe, since even if you can get a milkshake in California, they don't call it a frappe (rhymes with wrap). So something good did come out of all of this.

Berkeley, CA: Jimmy Bean's

Tortilla Eggs - 3 stars
$7.50
August 20, 2005

I had ambivalent feelings about Utah and Nevada. On the one hand, we were in the desert, it was blazingly hot every time we stopped, and good food was hard to find. (Although Starbucks, always out to trap travelers, set up shop in the Red Lion Inn and Casino in Elko, Nevada.) On the other hand, we were somewhere between Elko and Winnemucca, I looked over at Sylvia in the passenger seat and Dauber in her lap, as the sun-baked desert flashed by through the window and the distant mountains barely moved, and I felt happy. It was partly due to not thinking about work for a week and a half, and mainly due to being with my family. I wouldn't have changed a thing.

After the flat deserts and bare mountains of Nevada, the forested slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains were a welcome sight. What a beautiful place California is.

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We arrived in Berkeley around 11 am on Saturday and drove straight to Jimmy Bean's, our favorite breakfast place the last time we lived in the Bay Area. The tortilla eggs don't actually have any chicken in them, but this is my blog, and they are my favorite breakfast in the whole world (well, on this continent, anyway): delightfully soft scrambled eggs folded with home-fried potatoes lightly baked in a tortilla, flavored with three sauces in the side: salsa, cilantro pesto, and some kind of flavored sour cream (I don't like that one). Sitting at Jimmy Bean's, eating the eggs with a side of sourdough toast (from Acme, I believe), I felt like I had finally arrived.

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After 3,480 miles, the final chicken sandwich lineup (some individually reviewed, some not) looks like this:

1. Tuscan Chicken Sandwich, Panera (Topeka, KS)
   
2. Chicken Fajita Burrito, Chipotle Mexican Grill (Sharonville, OH)
3. Chicken Milano Sandwich, Quizno's (Colby, KS)
4. Chicken Zuma Sandwich, Albertson's (Aubrun, CA)
   
5. Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki Sandwich, Subway (outside St. Louis, MO)
   
6. Asiago Chicken Salad Sandwich, Borders (Champaign, IL)
7. Roast Chicken Sandwich, Albertson's (Laramie, WY)

Topeka, KN and Colby, KN

Panera (Topeka)
Tuscan Chicken Sandwich - 2 stars
$6.50 for 1/2 sandwich with soup or 1/2 salad
August 16, 2005

Quizno's (Colby)
Chicken Milano - 1 star
$8.19 (large)
August 17, 2005

The Starbucks Tax. Starbucks has discovered a clever way to tax people driving through the state of Kansas. From Salinas to the Colorado border - a distance of 250 miles - there is nothing. A few cornfields, a few cows, a few abandoned farmhouses, and nothing. However, at 100-mile intervals, there are two Starbucks stores. Basically, everyone from either coast will stop at one of them and spend three or four dollars on his or her preferred drug. It's as reliable as a toll booth.

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The exit 53 Starbucks sits alongside a Baskin Robbins and a Quizno's in something called The Oasis, which makes you wonder what native Kansans think of the name. The Chicken Milano sandwich begins with chopped pieces of mediocre chicken, toasted on an overly cheesy bun with sun-dried tomato pesto, cheese, and tomatos and topped with lettuce and jalapeno peppers. It's really pretty good, especially when you're in Western Kansas, despite the strange touches - lettuce on a toasted sandwich? jalapeno peppers on an Italian-style sandwich? and what's Milanese about it, anyway?

The Panera in Topeka was our fourth in three days (twice for drinks only). It's our home away from home: soup and salad combinations (it's critical to get two vegetables per meal to have any shot at seven fruits and vegetables a day), outdoor seating so we can eat with Dauber, free wi-fi to make hotel reservations and get directions to the next Panera, etc. It could be the McDonald's of the latte-drinking, Volvo-drinking, freak show set.

The Tuscan Sandwich has slices of lightly peppered natural chicken that are actually good in themselves, fresh mixed greens, and that staple of the new millenium, pesto aioli. The only flaw is the spongy "focaccia" it comes on, but it still gets the coveted second star.

Sharonville, OH and Champaign, IL

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Sharonville
Chicken Fajita Burrito - 1 star
$5.25
August 14, 2005

Borders Books and Music, Champaign
Asiago Chicken Salad Sandwich - 0 stars
about $5
August 15, 2005

If you look hard, you can see the differences in the many places you see as you drive across the United States. But mostly you just see how everything is more and more the same. And while I could go on for chapters on the topic, it definitely has its advantages.

I'm currently sitting in the passenger seat, typing this while sipping from a Starbucks decaf coffee and half-listening to an episode of This American Life downloaded from iTunes. So while the Iowa cornfields speed by out the window, I can enjoy my nice coastal lifestyle.

7 years ago making this trip I think the common denominator of America was McDonald's. On this trip, we've been to Panera three times in two days (would have been four, except the one in Sharonville was closed) and Starbucks twice. We seek out large, new strip malls because, along with Wal-Mart and Lowe's, they also bring the new wave of high-end coffee shops and fast casual restaurants. (We just passed a highway sign for Starbucks - Sylvia said it was "comforting.")

The chicken fajita burrito was just what you would expect from a chain that was probably a New York banker's concept, targeted squarely at middle-American tastes. The oxymoronic name was a dead giveaway - fajita burrito? - as was the gleaming white rice. But actually, it tasted pretty good, partly because it was drenched in their hottest salsa. Sylvia and I summed up the place as a Californian burrito place with less selection, higher prices, and much nicer décor.

We resorted to eating at Borders because, even if the food isn't good, the place is familiar and the coffee is decent. My sandwich, unfortunately, spent too much time in a refrigerator, and the cold chicken salad was swallowed up in a huge and characterless white bun.

I'm not sure where we'll go for lunch today, but we already have the address of a Whole Foods for dinner in Overland Park, Kansas.

Amherst, MA: Bertucci’s

Chicken Marinara Sandwich – 1 star
about $8 with pasta salad
July 31, 2005

In addition to all the usual excuses for not posting to my blog, there are two others: first, I have been traveling less over the past two months and, thanks to my move to California, I am now on my last trip back to the office for a year; and second, due to my newfound obsession with eating at least seven fruits and vegetables a day, my sandwich consumption has declined precipitously.

But in the course of saying our farewells to our favorite places in Western Massachusetts, Sylvia and I stopped by Bertucci’s today for lunch, even though the South Beach Diet (hers, not mine) put our favorite margarita pizza (really, the closest I’ve found in this country to the original pizza of Naples) beyond reach a long time ago. At its center, the Chicken Marinara Sandwich features a tender, flattened, lightly breaded chicken breast, topped with Bertucci’s (how do you make a possessive of that?) fruity, fresh-tasting tomato sauce. All of that was good, but it was delivered in a somewhat spongy mock-focaccia roll with caramelized onions that absorbed more flavor than it provided. The side pasta salad had a nice lemony dressing, but underneath was a distinct core of blandness.

While preparing for the move, I also repeated the periodic ritual of going through my old boxes of various souvenirs I hadn’t opened since the last move and tossing out everything that seemed less important now than it did four years ago: notebooks from previous jobs, magazines recording French football games that no longer seemed that important, readings from courses that I will never teach again – and all of my notes and research files from my dissertation. Although the possibility had not occurred to me in years, now it really will be impossible for me to convert my dissertation into a book.

By sheer coincidence, I recently read Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, by Peter Gordon, my closest friend and colleague among my graduate school classmates. Peter and I started together, shared the same advisor and field, did research together in Paris, etc., and now he is a tenured professor at Harvard (and he got tenure early, no less). Reading his book was intensely disconcerting, first because it exists in a completely different intellectual universe than the one I currently inhabit – and second, because I used to live in that universe. So at the same time that I was only partially understanding what I was reading, I could remember the younger version of myself who did understand Weimar-era German philosophy. Reading about Heidegger is a kind of experience that I first encountered when reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology in college: you make a leap into another conceptual framework, and then everything makes sense, but otherwise it is just words on a page. So here I was, sitting on a plane back from the wedding of the person I lived with in graduate school (someone completely different), thinking that I could understand this book if I really wanted to, but not sure it was worth the effort. But I read it for Peter, and I understand it’s an excellent book, so if you do care about Weimar-era philosophy, let me know and I’ll lend you my copy.

Dauber update

Apart from a little unexplained vomiting, Dauber continues to be in fine health – so much so, in fact, that my doctor friends at the wedding (I lived with medical students for a few years in grad school) said that it was highly unlikely that he actually has pancreatic cancer at this point, two months after the diagnosis. So in all likelihood, he will be making the trip with us to California, although it’s anyone’s guess if he’ll make the trip back in a year.

San Jose, CA: California Pizza Kitchen

Caesar Chicken Sandwich - 1 star

$7.49

The best thing about this sandwich was that I actually got to eat it. Like many Fridays, I was busy well past the time when I should have gone to the airport, in this case walking out at 10.15 to catch an 11.31 flight at SJC (about a thirty-minute drive, plus time to get gas, plus 10-15 minutes for the brontosauran rental car shuttle to pick you up and take you to the terminal). On top of that, I had to check luggage, and I was flying on American, where I can’t use the short line. But in four years at this company, flying almost every week, I’ve never missed a flight (except for connections missed due to the airline, or return flights I had to rebook because meetings went way over time), so I’ve developed a reverse-fatalistic approach to airline travel: I assume that things will work out and I’ll make my flight. (The best confirmation of this was the day I had to fly home early because my dog was in the hospital, and I arrived at the terminal eight minutes before departure – only to find the flight was delayed by an hour.)

Speeding south on 101, I had already decided to break one of the streaks that I was proud of: I had never returned a rental car without filling the gas tank. (And no, John, I’m not going to expense the fill-up charge.) Then, on top of that, I was pulled over for the first speeding ticket or other moving violation of my life. Now, a few minutes before getting pulled over, I had actually been driving at around 88 mph (and I did slow down once I saw that), so when the cop asked if I knew how fast I had been driving, I said, “75 to 80.” But he had only recorded me driving 75. Now, how can you possibly get a speeding ticket driving 75 on 101 (where the speed limit is 65), IN THE MIDDLE LANE? But anyway, I digress… Finally, when I got to the rental car center, the handheld machine they use to give you a receipt had run out of paper, so I had to go into the building to get a receipt, which I fortunately decided not to do.

But one thing did work out: there was a short line at curbside check-in, and their cut-off is 30 minutes before departure, so I made it. And I got to buy my sandwich before getting on board. In picking the sandwich, I was sacrificing any hope I had of getting to seven servings of fruits and vegetables today (my current obsession). But when choosing between a boxed sandwich and a boxed salad to eat on a plane, I just couldn’t go with the salad. (In a nutshell, this is why my blog is about chicken sandwiches, not salads.) I did buy a sorry-looking banana, though.

As a marketing person, I am amazed at the way the word “Caesar” has become attached to a wide range of food products that bear increasingly less resemblance to the original Caesar salad. I mean, who decided that what a perfectly nice salad of Romaine lettuce, croutons, anchovies, parmesan cheese, and (sometimes) hard-boiled eggs needed was – slabs of chicken? And who decided to take the chicken, turn it into chicken salad, and put it on a soft bun with red onions baked into the top, combined with lettuce and tomato and thin shavings of a too-dry, too-salty imitation parmesan cheese? But someone knew that you could charge more for a Caesar chicken sandwich than for a chicken salad sandwich. And there you go.

Dauber update

Dauber was in very good health and spirits for the second half of June. However, he vomited three times on July 1 and once on July 4, so we are worried that his cancer may be reappearing. (Presumably it’s been there for a while, but hadn’t been causing symptoms.) He still is moderately energetic, has a healthy appetite, and likes going for walks, so we are just trying to spend as much time with him as possible while he is still happy and active.

Coventry, RI: Denny's

Italian Chicken Melt - 0 stars
about $7 with fries
June 7, 2005

In some ways, it was a prototypical sales call. I was working on a demo in the hotel, trapped in a huge but strangely desolate strip mall complex: a Hampton Inn, a Wendy's, a Denny's, a gas station, a Home Depot, and vast expanses of nothing more typical of Arizona than of Rhode Island - no forests, no farmland, no towns, just nothing. The first day's 7-hour demo had gone very well, but instead of feeling happy I just felt exhausted at the prospect of preparing for the next day's 7-hour demo.

I actually have a soft spot for Denny's, although I'm not sure why. I think it's because of the menus - they were one of the first chains to realize that it doesn't matter how bad the food is, as long as you have big juicy photos of the food in your menus. Anyway, the Italian Chicken Melt seemed safe enough - essentially a chicken parm sandwich, as we call it back home in Massachusetts. The chicken was fine, the tomato sauce was acceptable in a kind of canned and fruity way, and I was smart enough to order it without lettuce (lettuce on a breaded chicken breast covered with tomato sauce and cheese?), but the cheese was just ... weird. It was thinly sliced in perfect triangles, except it had a flavor I could not place, as if someone were trying to make mozzarella cheese who had never eaten mozzarella cheese, based on a verbal description by someone who didn't really like mozzarella cheese. It was one of those things where I would try to isolate the cheese so that I could figure out what that flavor was, but all I could determine was that I didn't like it.

It was not a prototypical sales call because I almost broke down crying during lunch (grilled cheese and tomato, if you must know) while talking to my wife because my dog had vomited again that morning after vomiting the night before. But he made it through that week, and the week after that, and now he seems to be largely recovered from his pancreatitis. He is ravenously hungry, and he wakes us up early in the morning asking to be fed (no doubt a by-product of our feeding him every two hours during the night while he was sick), and he barks angrily at strangers, and he goes for walks, though not quite as long as before. According to the official diagnosis he still has pancreatic cancer, which means he has only a few months left to live, but it seems like at least a few of them will be happy.

Windsor Locks, CT: Fresh City

Chicken Fajita Wrap - 1 star
$6.29

Yes, it's been a while since I've written about a chicken sandwich. I actually eat fewer than one might think. You see, I don't particularly like chicken sandwiches - they're my fallback when I'm on the road in places that don't have very good food (that would be most places). But recently I've been spending most of my time at home or in California, where there are plenty of better things to eat. I ate the chicken fajita wrap my last time flying out of Bradley, on the way to the ACORD/LOMA conference in Orlando on May 22. It was better than my previous Fresh City experience, so it got a star. There's your review.

My dog, however, may never have chicken again. He is very sick.

Obviously, this is very sad and difficult to deal with, particularly for someone whose life has really had a minimum of hardship, emotional or otherwise. Strangely enough, knowing that he is likely to die soon is not the hardest part of it.

I think the saddest thing is thinking of all the things he will never do again. You see, Dauber really loves chicken. If you hold a piece of chicken in front of him, he will stare at it like a hawk focused on its prey, and he will begin to quiver with excitement. And right now, we just try to feed him a tablespoon of softened baked potato at a time, and we're happy if he doesn't throw it up. Then there are salmon, beef, duck, eggs, and all the other things he loves. Especially cantaloupe. If you had a bowl of cantaloupe, ate it, and took away the bowl, he would still sniff the air frantically looking for the cantaloupe.

And running. Dauber may never run again. He can walk, and occasionally he will trot for a few yards. But he may never thunder across the ground with that bounding gallop I remember, chasing after squirrels, his mortal enemy. When we came home in the evening, if he hadn't walked enough during the day, he would sprint back and forth between us at top speed, simply happy to be running.

But he may eat chicken and run and chase squirrels again. You see, we just don't know. And that makes it hard, too. Last week, when it seemed like he might not even stand again, he had an acute case of pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas). Thanks to great medical care, the inflammation has come down considerably, and he has improved greatly; but now that the inflammation is down, it's clear that he has a tumor in his pancreas. So he may return to his old self for a few weeks or months before the tumor grows out of control; or this may be as good as it will ever get, and he may never eat anything better than watery baked potato. And it's hard to plan a trip, even for two days, when you know you may be losing two days of your dog's last week of life.

I also think about all the things he will never get to do. He'll never see the farm that we had planned, with three chickens, two pygmy goats, and perhaps a couple of llamas. He'll never get to ride in the car we talked about buying for him, so he would have a better view outside. He'll never see our children (and we can throw out the CD we got to prepare him for the sounds of a baby in the house).

When you start a company, no matter how hard you try not to think of it, people ask you what you will do if the company is successful and you make a lot of money. I always said I would stay home and play with Dauber. I hoped I could make up for all the days and weeks I spent away from home.

Well, I ran out of time.

London, England: Upper Crust

Chicken Tikka Sandwich - 1 star
About 3 pounds

On the way from Manchester to London (actually, to Tim's place in Speen, where I slept in a 17th-century house for the first time in my life) in Tim's Boxster, I saw one of the most disturbing things in my life. We were at a cafe in a rest stop, and behind a sign saying "scones," they had these large, rectangular, brownish, hard-looking things that looked uncannnily like what they call scones in the United States. My favorite element of English cuisine is the traditional scone - smaller, round, off-white, and crumbly in a buttery sort of way, eaten with butter or clotted cream (which deserves a paragraph of its own). Now, apparently, in addition to exporting our fast food and our movies, we are even exporting our mediocre baked goods. What's next? American apple pie in Paris?

Anyway, on Thursday morning I managed to eat a traditional scone at an Upper Crust in the City, so I went back to them for dinner in Waterloo station while waiting for the Eurostar to Paris. The chicken tikka sandwich was surprisingly good. It was a little cold from sitting in a refrigerated case all day, but the chihcken was tender and flavorful, the mayonnaise-like spread was not too overpowering, and the bread was a reminder of the difference between Europe and the United States: even in a fast food-style place in a train station, you can get the kind of baguette that cannot be found between New York and California. And the egg and tomato sandwich I had wasn't bad, either.

London, England: Ponti's

Mediterranean chicken sandwich - 0 stars
About 4 pounds, with exactly 3 potato chips

I spent my first two days in England trying to find a chicken sandwich. On Monday in the hotel restaurant in Manchester I ordered the "spicy chicken," neglecting to note the absence of the word sandwich, and was treated to a rather small and not very spicy fried thigh and leg. (This was the "American" entry in the "around the world" section of the menu, by the way. Also by the way, the menu included all sorts of drinks I had never seen before, many including various proportions of vodka and Red Bull.) On Tuesday at the prospect site they brought in those lovely sandwiches on quartered white bread with various fillings, and I may have had chicken in one of them, but to be honest I couldn't tell. (One was hard-boiled egg with lettuce, I know that.) On Wednesday in London I ordered a chicken sandwich but accidentally picked up someone else's prosciutto and mozarella sandwich, which was quite good. But I digress.

The Meditteranean chicken at Ponti's was quite disappointing for the heart of London's financial district: bland and overcooked chicken with a layer of roast vegetables, which turned out to be largely eggplant, on top of surprisingly bland ciabatta-like bread. Luckily for the American visitor (me), it was one of the few things that were still affordable after the collapse of the dollar.

Which got me to thinking ... we're exporting software, right? So we should be able to undercut all of our European competitors. At least there's a silver lining to the largest trade and budget deficits in history.

Hastings, MI: Applebee's

Chicken Fajita Rollup - 1 star
$6.29 with fries, about $1 extra for onion peels instead

There is a place in downtown Hastings called Richie's Diner. Richie's occupies a proud place in the history of our company; it was there that Alex, John R., and I had breakfast before the sales call that led to our first (or second, or third, depending on how you count them) customer. Richie's is an old-style diner, where there is no non-smoking section to speak of, the food is cheap, and the diners look at you funny if you go in wearing a suit.

On this occasion, I was with the guys implementing our customer's document management system. And we did not go to Richie's. Instead, we went to Applebee's. The sad truth is that after six months in Hastings, I reluctantly concluded that Applebee's was in fact my favorite place to eat. And on this walk down memory lane, I had my old standby - the chicken fajita rollup, with lettuce, tomato, and melted cheese in a tortilla. The chicken was nicely seasoned and not too overcooked, although it could have used more spice. There was too much lettuce, and the ratio of tortilla to contents was too high. But with a dash of hot sauce, it makes a perfectly acceptable lunch, and the onion peels (what's an onion "peel," anyway?) were hot and fried-tasting as usual.

The cafeteria was serving pizza, but no one else wanted to go there.