South Beach

Pizza Rustica - 2 stars
3 locations
Miami Beach, FL

La Provence - 1 star
1627 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL

Front Porch Cafe - 1 star
1418 Ocean Dr
Miami Beach, FL


I was lying on my beach chair, not ten feet from a woman talking loudly on her cell phone. She was talking about an article in the New York Post about a "device" that you could plug into a cell phone to retrieve its deleted text messages (no big surprise, since in any reusable memory information is not actually overwritten when you mark it for deletion). But she emphasized that "I never text you, and you never text me," so they were safe. Then they talked about this and that and getting together before saying "I love you" (in the way you say it to your lover, not your mother). Pause. Then her kids and her husband walked up from the water and sat down with her.

It wasn't just that she announced to me, the unknown stranger, that she was having an affair. It was that she did it while worrying about someone reading her undeleted text messages and finding out she was having an affair. But we're here to talk about food, not other people's affairs.

Pizza Rustica has made a reputation for itself as the go-to place for late-night casual eating while pausing between trendy clubs in South Beach. What was I doing clubbing in South Beach, you may ask? Actually, I was getting three take-out pizzas to eat with my family and my sister's family in our hotel suites, which is much easier than taking three girls ages 1, 2, and 4 out to a restaurant. But whatever the setting, the pizza was delicious. In the storefront they sell those rectangular slices with a too-thick, spongy crust - described locally as "Tuscan style" or "Roman style" and called "Sicilian" in New England where I live, although I saw nothing of the sort in Tuscany or in Rome - but the take-out pizzas are round with a nice thin crust. We got a margherita, a rustica, and an arugula, all of which were good both for dinner and the next morning for breakfast and lunch. They might have trouble in New York or Berkeley, but for Miami they do just fine.

Although South Beach has some very good restaurants, in my mind it's like Las Vegas - the good restaurants are more expensive than they should be, and there are plenty of expensive but mediocre ones as well. But all in all we had a reasonable eating time. Besides Pizza Rustica, we had breakfast at the Front Porch Cafe on the same block as our hotel, where you can look out at the park and the sand dune that shields the beach beyond, and where I had a perfectly good breakfast burrito with home fries. The last day we had lunch at La Provence, on an unpromising stretch of Collins Ave. My tomato-mozzarella-basil sandwich was under-heated and devoid of character, but the apricot and raspberry tarts were a decent facsimile of the French variety, and their "rustique baguette" was surprisingly good, with a hearty crust yet soft and fluffy inside.

My trips to South Beach itself nicely illustrate the three ages of my working life. I first came in September 2000 for Ariba's user group conference, right at the peak of our bubble (when my unvested options were worth over $3 million on paper), and spent the entire time working - on what, I can barely remember, although I know there was PowerPoint involved. I don't have any memory of being outside, although I must have been, because I stayed in the Loews Hotel and the conference was in the convention center. I think I may have looked out and seen the beach from a distance, but I'm not sure.

My second visit was in December 2004 with my wife, my sister, her husband, and their one-year-old daughter. We went to the beach, ate at nice restaurants, visited Little Havana, looked for manatees, and generally had a nice time.

This time, of course, we had our own daughter, which meant that our days were a combination of the beach, the playground, the pool, the other playground, and the other other playground, we spent the entire time within half a mile of our hotel, and take-out pizza was as good as the food got. (At the playgrounds, by the way, we English-speaking Americans were a distinct minority, trailing the Russians, who were everywhere, the Spanish-speaking Americans, and probably the French as well. That's what happens when your currency is worthless but you have nice beaches.) But this time was by far my favorite trip. Holding my daughter in my arms as we bobbed in the ocean, or seeing her bounce up and down with excitement as we approached the playground, I wished I could just stay there forever.

Now Is the Time

Those one or two people who use an RSS aggregator to read my blog may have noticed a post I made in favor of John Edwards a few days before Iowa. I pulled that post from the site a few minutes later, having decided not to put a political endorsement on a blog that has a link from a couple internal web pages at my company. Which is, of course, another example of Democrats obeying scruples that Republicans simply don't have: for example, Stanley O'Neal, when he was CEO of Merrill (before being exposed as an unimaginably incompetent fool who had no idea how his company was losing tens of billions of dollars in businesses that he boasted about building), pressured more than a hundred Merrill executives into donating $2,000 each to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004.

But anyway, screw that.

If you are a Republican, now is the time to stop reading. If you are a Democrat, now is the time to give money to Barack Obama.

I won't go into all the reasons I think Obama would be a better President than Hillary Clinton. The fact is that a vast majority of Democrats think either one would be a fine president. But ...

Barack Obama has the best chance of beating John McCain. Besides all the usual arguments - lower negatives and higher positives than Clinton, better ability to connect with people, Clinton's unique ability to unify the Republican party and get the Republican base to the polls - the surveys are clear and consistent: Obama always beats McCain, Clinton always loses.

We need a candidate now, or Obama and Clinton will tear each other apart all the way until the convention, while McCain raises money and appeases the conservative base. Obama is clearly the choice of the people, with 11 consecutive primary wins, including this week's 17-point win in Wisconsin - the type of heavily-white, old-manufacturing state where Clinton should do well. Our best hope is for Obama to deliver a knockout blow by sweeping all of the March 4 states. Anything less and Clinton will probably fight it out to the end. And to do that, he needs your money now when he's deciding how many television ads to buy in Ohio and Texas.

Barack Obama is our best chance at a presidential win in November, a landslide in the Congressional elections, and a better future for our country. I just made my second $500 contribution to his campaign. If you are planning to contribute anything at all in this election cycle, now is the time.

History

Yes, I have a Ph.D. in history. Not only in history, but in French intellectual history. And not only French intellectual history, but avant-garde cultural movements in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Existentialism? people sometimes ask. No - some people after the existentialists, who were much less interesting and even less important.

For a while I was actually embarrassed by this. My biography on my company's web site, for example, used to say just that I had a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley - on the assumption that readers would assume I got the degree in CS, or EE, or something more relevant to what I do for a living. (This was a calculated ruse, since of the three doctorates on the founding team, one was in history, one in philosophy, and one, I think, in psychology.) I think I was embarrassed by having studied something so esoteric that it turned out not only to be useless in the usual sense of the term, but useless to me, in that it was not a topic of even enough academic interest (and the phrase "academic interest" already means that something has little relevance) to land me a decent academic job.

But I'm not embarrassed any more, whether due to age, or maturity, or having more or less succeeded in career #3. Looking back, not only did I have a lot of good "life experiences" (lived in Berkeley, went on strike, learned how to throw a dinner party, lived in Paris, ate at lots of great places, lived in Berlin when it was still rough around the edges, traveled throughout southern Italy), but I had the academic experience as well, the one where you immerse yourself deeply in a specific topic until thinking and writing about it becomes second nature. And I know it must have been second nature at the time, because now that I have been out of that world for more than ten years it seems like a distant planet to me.

I'm on this topic because this is the first full week this year that I'm not flying anywhere, so I'm at home, and I'm reading The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, by the path-breaking Russian historian John Randolph - a work of history so specialized that if you type "The House in the Garden" into Amazon it will show up on the 3rd page of the results, and its current ranking in books is 974,644. Why am I reading this book? Because John was a friend of mine in graduate school, and he actually should have introduced me to my wife (because his mother worked with her before she came to Berkeley), but we met independently. I have an occasional habit of buying books and CDs by friends of mine (a number of whom are professional classical musicians, but that's another story), although I haven't invested in the medieval historians yetbecause their books cost over $80 a pop. (Sorry Jay and Jason, I'm waiting for you to sell out and write your popular books.)

Anyway, The House in the Garden is a beautiful example of the historian's art: it takes a miniature as its subject (in this case, the actual house that the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin grew up in - there, now John will be mad at me for having reduced Mikhail Bakunin to "the anarchist"), examines it and the people who lived there in loving detail, and shows how it either exemplifies or is influenced by the larger historical trends of its time. And that is only a crude description of the portrait painted and the arguments made by the book.

Unlike the vast majority of what I read, it is also a book I have to read slowly, because I'm re not reading it just to get information and move on (what information could the non-specialist possibly need about some the philosophical inclinations of early-nineteenth-century Russian noblemen); I'm reading it to re-immerse myself in that world of ideas that I left when I entered the business world. And like with my friend Peter's book about Franz Rosenzweig, it takes effort to re-enter that world and suspend not disbelief, but the feeling that I could be doing something more productive with my time. If I spend enough time with the book, I can get back to the feeling that ideas, and their history, are crucially important and valuable in and of themselves, which is a feeling I had for most of the 1990s. And clearly they are at least as important as most of what most people spend most of their time doing.

There may not be many people who will buy John's book, but part of me envies him all the same for his ability to immerse himself in his field to the point where it is as natural as breathing. Academic research is hard work, and depressing at times, and knowing that few people will read your work doesn't make it easier. But in this case, I believe this book got him tenure the University of Illinois. And we should all be so fortunate.

Why?

I recently flew home from Florida - Miami Beach in particular - where it was 85 degrees and sunny today, the air so perfectly warm and slightly heavy in the air it feels like you are suspended in it. At the company we visited, there was a Lamborghini parked in one of the reserved spaces just in front of the door, and after lunch we had to navigate around a Rolls in the restaurant parking lot. But that's not what I'm going to write about.

On the plane, I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, the latest bestselling book about (to simplify vastly) food and where it comes from - think of it as a more philosophical version of Fast Food Nation, the book that inoculated me against eating at McDonald's. In the last section of this book - just before describing how he went hunting and shot a pig - Pollan discusses vegetarianism, and comes to a decidedly murky conclusion. After reviewing in detail the arguments for animal rights, and the evils of the meat-production industry, he seems to say that there are two possible responses: to look away (and ignore where meat comes from) or to be a vegetarian. But after several more pages he ends up arguing, or more accurately implying, that the most moral stance is to eat meat, but in full consciousness of what you are doing. As I said, it's pretty murky.

But enough about him; let's talk about me. I just ate at two restaurants where the practical drawbacks of being a vegetarian are hard to ignore: Chili's (which was my choice, but it was late and I was hungry and it was there), where the black bean burger with steamed vegetables is the only vegetarian entrée on the entire menu, and Hunter's, a very nice restaurant in North Miami Beach overlooking the water, where I had an undistinguished house salad (iceberg lettuce, crunchy julienned carrots, corn, big tomato wedges, creamy vinaigrette (?!)) and a dish of brown rice and black beans. And remember, last week I ate an omelet at a nice French restaurant on the Ile St. Louis in Paris because it was the only vegetarian main course.

People ask me occasionally why I am a vegetarian, especially since I just became one. (Although I haven't eaten mammals in several years, or birds in two years, I only stopped eating seafood a couple months ago - and my close friends know that there is one enormous loophole in my vegetarianism.) If you're not interested in this whole question and find vegetarians humorless and self-righteous, stop reading here.

There are many reasons to be a vegetarian, but none are all that compelling. I don't do it for my health; although it is good to eat fruits and vegetables, in my case being a vegetarian means that I eat a lot of carbohydrates and probably don't get enough protein. (If you could condense Pollan's advice on the subject of health into a sentence, I think it would be "eat as un-processed food as possible.")

On average, not eating meat is better for the environment than eating meat: first, modern factory meat production is far more polluting than growing vegetables (think enormous swamps of pig shit washing into rivers and lakes); and second, it takes something like ten calories of grains to produce one calorie of meat, so by eating meat you are indirectly consuming an enormous amount of grain, whose production is also extremely polluting (think lakes of nitrogen-rich fertilizer washing into the Gulf of Mexico and suffocating sea life for thousands of square miles). And because farming today consumes enormous amounts of fossil fuels (as Pollan says, where once we ate solar energy transformed into food by plants, now most of the energy we eat comes from fossil fuels), one of the surest and easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to reduce your meat consumption. But this is not a conclusive argument; from an environmental perspective, it is probably better to eat a cow that grazed on grass on a sustainable farm than to eat, like I did in National Airport, a burrito with rice, beans, squash, and guacamole wrapped in a flour tortilla, every ingredient of which came from a factory farm.

Then there are the moral arguments, of which I think there are basically two. The first is that the production of meat causes intense suffering to millions if not billions of animals at every moment of every day. This is basically an inarguable fact, and I'll spare the details for those who eat meat. This is essentially a utilitarian argument that says that by eating meat you are causing suffering to animals, many of which are every bit as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog. But this is not an invincible argument. First, it leaves open the option of eating cows that graze happily on a diet of mixed grasses. (There are far fewer of these cows than you might think, though; most of the politically correct meat you see at Whole Foods comes from a factory farm, just not quite as brutal a farm as the meat at Safeway.) Second, it leaves open the option of eating animals that are not as conscious, intelligent, and loving as my dog - some kinds of shellfish come to mind. Third, one could quibble about consistency - what about leather shoes? what about eating soybeans from farms that were cleared out of the Amazon rainforest, destroying habitats for thousands of endangered species? Fourth, you could go down the interminable rathole of what would happen to these domesticated species if humans stopped eating them; most of them would vanish from the face of the earth. To which I would say, better that than to spend your lifetime... wait, I said I would spare the details. On balance, though, I think these are weak counter-arguments; even if you aren't a vegetarian, it remains a fact that by eating less factory-produced meat you are reducing suffering among intelligent animals.

The second moral argument is that it's just wrong to eat animals, no matter how happily they were raised. I can't say why, because arguments from principle invariably depend on your principles, but the easiest way to argue this is to compare it to cannibalism. Most people believe on principle that it's wrong to eat other people. I believe that at some point in the future we will believe the same thing about animals, because we will no longer be able to justify the distinction we draw between ourselves and all other species. The more we learn about dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, bonobos, dogs, and pigs, the more they seem like us.

But ultimately I'm not sure I could defend that position, either, against a determined and sufficiently sophist opponent. In the end, I don't eat meat because it's something that I can do. To be honest, it's simpler and easier than wondering how happy the cow was each time I order a hamburger; it's easier than wondering if a flounder has feelings (not sure), or if a scallop has feelings (I doubt it); it's easier than having to come up with flimsy reasons why my dog is different from my food. And finally, it makes me happy to be doing something.

The Last Time ...

I'm in Paris again.

Like the last couple times I've come here, I can't t help but wonder: "Is this the last time I will come to Paris?" Part of it is being 38 years old and right about the middle of my life expectancy; for no rational reason, having less time to live than I've already had reminds me that I will not do everything I would like to do, nor will I do anything unlimited number of times.

I am actually quite fine with this. From my perspective, I've already had three fulfilling careers (music, academics, business), even if they weren't all as successful as I might have liked. (I recently read The Last Tycoons, a breezy book about the investment bank Lazard, which mentioned some banker who made tens of millions of dollars and is now getting a Ph.D. in history; "done that," I thought.) And I don't have what is these days called a "bucket list;" if I were to learn I had six months to live, I would spend most of it at home with my wife, my daughter, and my dog, with maybe a few trips to see a few close friends.

But it is a fact that there will be a last time that I visit Paris, and for all I know this could be it. Our European teams are getting bigger and more experienced, to the point where they will need fewer visits from founders like me; with a child, our vacations now are more likely to be at beaches in Florida or Delaware than in Europe; and it gets harder and harder to spend time away from my daughter. When I'm home, one game she likes is when I pick her up so she can look at the family photos in the hallway. If I say "Where's Daddy?" she points at my picture and then points to me (actually, she sticks her finger in my neck) with a big smile. My wife emailed me to say that now when she points at my picture she puts up her hands in her sign for "Where?"

If this was my last trip, it was, unfortunately, probably the worst few days of eating I've ever had in Paris. Part of this is due to being a vegetarian - when you subtract fish, there are virtually no main courses you can eat in a French restaurant - and part of it was staying in an area with many tourist hotels (we were next to the Hard Rock Cafe, of all places) and hence many mediocre restaurants, but mostly it was due to having just too much work to do. We had two days of meetings with a potential and very large French customer, and I had to present and demonstrate to them for most of those two days - in French. And on top of that I spent two hours late Tuesday night - before preparing for Wednesday's presentation - explaining our business to our finance team. So speed, not quality, was the key culinary requirement.

Somehow I managed to avoid eating a single good croissant au beurre in five days (I had one decent one and two mediocre ones), a single piece of pain Poilane, or a single spectacular fruit tart (one good, two mediocre). On Sunday I took a walk with Alex and Sigrid, and we stopped by Cacao et Chocolat for hot chocolate and Pierre Herme for macarons, which were not as sublime as I remembered them, and on my last night Jay and I went to Le Tastevin, a nice restaurant on the main street of the Ile St. Louis where I had two scoops of Berthillon sorbet - green apple and cassis (black currant) - which, despite being freezer-burned, did have the intense concentration of fruit found nowhere else in the world. (I also split a bottle of wine with Jay and had two whiskeys in his apartment afterward, which, after the last time we got together, I guess makes us drinking buddies.)

But I did get to stroll one more time through the Luxembourg Gardens, which I remember from my first trip back in 1991, and from when I used to live on the Left Bank, and watch the kids playing with their boats in the central fountain - only now the boats are all remote-controlled, not the miniature sailboats you used to see. So if it was my last trip - which I doubt - I can live with that.

A Real Diner

Paul's Diner - 2 stars
6 Carlisle Rd.
Westford, MA

On Wednesday I was in Northeastern Massachusetts, driving to New Hampshire to visit a client, when I pulled off of 495 to get gas. After getting gas, I was hungry, and I had some extra time, so I started looking for one of the usual standbys to grab breakfast: maybe Panera, or Starbucks, or some Mexican chain that served breakfast burritos. Instead, I ended up at Paul's Diner.

Paul's is the kind of diner you can't find in California, or in any gentrified neighborhood, or in the strip malls that litter the country - no 50's nostalgia memorabilia, no jukeboxes, no guacamole, no inflated prices, and only open for breakfast and lunch. (It is not the other type of classic diner - the Greek-owned, 24-hour kind with a twenty-page menu.) I had an egg-and-cheese sandwich on an English muffin and home fries for less than $4, and it was as good as they come. The home fries were chunks of red new potatoes, crispy on the outside and tender on the inside like I can never manage to make them at home. And they even had free wireless Internet access. I'm already looking forward to having breakfast there next week when I have to go back to New Hampshire.

In between, though, I have to go to Paris for five days, and I'll have little time for anything except work. On the way to the airport I picked up a hitchhiker, trying to follow through on my advice to help other people when you are traveling. He was in his 30s, friendly, fit, clean-cut ... and homeless. He used to have a family and a job (as a graphic designer) in Maine, but then he split up with his wife, and she moved to Massachusetts with the kids. So he gave up everything and moved to Massachusetts, without a job or a place to live, so he could see his kids. He lived in his car for a while, but then it got too cold and his car broke down anyway, so now he's living in a shelter and trying to find a job, but no one is hiring graphic designers. But he does get to see his kids often. "It's humbling," he said about leaving his professional life to become a homeless person. But for him, he didn't have a choice; it was that important to be close to his children.

I couldn't avoid asking myself if I would make the same choice. And to tell the truth, I don't think I can say I would. I like to think I would do anything to be close to my daughter, but the fact is that I already spend about 30-40% of my time away from home. In theory I could get a job that doesn't require travel, but the truth is that I haven't. And this year I'm even traveling more than I have since 2004. I hope Willow will forgive me.

One Small Country

Waffle House - 2 stars
All over the South

None of my friends understand my affection for Waffle House. After all, I am a California foodie at heart who learned how to cook as a graduate student (in the humanities, no less) in Berkeley - and a vegetarian.

If I wanted, I could explain my relationship to Waffle House with a sentimental story. The first time I ever ate at Waffle House was on Thursday, September 13, 2001. I had been trapped in New Orleans with maybe a hundred people from my company, because we were having a user group meeting there. On Wednesday night, a few of us went to the New Orleans airport to see if we could get a flight to San Francisco, because some airports were opening, but New Orleans didn't. So three of us - Sundar, Marcus, and I - rented a big old American car and drove through the night to Dallas, which we expected was more likely to have flights in the morning. We ate breakfast at Waffle House somewhere near the airport around 6 am the next morning. And we got on a United flight home that morning, which made us among the first people to start flying again. (I was also in the air at midnight on New Year's Eve, 2000, but that's another story.)

But the real reason is I just like the food. The summer when I was coming to Louisville every week I would eat there at least once each trip. This morning I had the usual - a double order of hash browns with onions and jalapeno peppers, and two eggs over hard (sometimes I have an egg and cheese sandwich instead of just the eggs). The hash browns are nice and crispy, with the sweetness of the onions and the spice of the peppers, and the eggs are better than you'll find at far more expensive places like Denny's or the Courtyard Marriott lobby (my other choice). The portions are reasonable (not gargantuan), and the prices are so cheap you can order everything you want.

I even woke up half an hour earlier than necessary just so I could go to Waffle House. Those who know me will realize there are few greater recommendations I can give than that.

Now, the people who work at Waffle House are invariably friendly and helpful, but to tell the truth I never thought I had a lot in common with them. Call me provincial, call me a snob, whatever. But I am a liberal Korean-American who studied French intellectual history, of all things, and has lived his whole life on the coasts (and in France, of all places) - and an atheist to boot. I could go on.

But this morning the Waffle House staff were talking about Seinfeld and how much they loved it, and they were true aficionados. They not only knew about Soup Nazi (everyone does), but they were talking about Elaine dancing, and the "on the wagon/off the wagon" episode, and the episode when Kramer and the car salesman see how far they can drive without running out of gas. Seinfeld was my favorite TV show of the 1990s (until I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the undoubted greatest TV show of all time), and they loved it every bit as much as I did.

We really are one country, like it or not.

Down Memory Lane

Senor Jalapeno - 1 star
SJC, Terminal C

French Meadow Organic Bakery - 2 stars
MSP

I used to fly to San Jose a lot when visiting my office, for cost reasons, but sometime around 2005-2006 it became cheaper to fly in and out of San Francisco, which is closer to the office anyway. This week, though, I bought a ticket at the last minute and it was cheaper to return from San Jose, so this morning I made the drive down 101 through Silicon Valley for the first time in what seemed like years.

The drive was a bit like looking at the striated walls of the Grand Canyon or anyplace else that you can see the layers of geological history, because for me it is a reverse-chronological tour through my career in the technology industry. I pulled out of our gleaming, glass complex in San Mateo just north of Highway 92, which used to belong to Siebel. Heading south on 101, I first passed the dirty-white Bay View building in the low(er)-rent part of San Mateo, where my company spent the last five years, growing from less than half of one floor (developers spread across the open space in the middle, sales and marketing sharing offices along the wall, Marcus's print of a New Yorker cartoon entitled "Making the big sale," showing a salesman in a suit sitting down with the customer, a dog, for a meal of dog food) to filling three floors and bursting at the seams. 10 minutes later there was the Redwood City apartment building where John R. and I shared a dingy two-bedroom apartment with his poker-playing college friend for three years during our frequent trips to California. Then unincorporated Menlo Park, on the Bay side of 101, where we founded the company in 2001 in the extra space of Ken's friend's (now-folded) startup, going out to eat in the taquerias where the jukebox only played Mexican pop music; real tacos, just beef on corn tortillas with nothing more than onions, hot sauce, and lime juice remain one of the few things I miss from my meat-eating days.

Continuing south, there is the Shoreline Boulevard exit in Mountain View for Ariba's old headquarters, across the street from Silicon Graphics, where we used to sneak into the cafeteria for lunch. That was where I got my first intoxicating taste of the startup life, although by that time Ariba already had 500 employees and more money than it knew what to do with. Then at the south end of Moffett Field the freeway passes right by the new glass towers we moved to in 2001, right when our stock had fallen by 98% and we had to lay off half the company. I filled up the gas tank on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, just past the Hobee's where I think Marcus and I first tried to convince Ken to start a company with us - arguably one of the most important days in my company's history.

Then just a few miles further south, in Santa Clara, you pass the nondescript, blue-and-beige headquarters of Intel, my first client after I moved from McKinsey's New York office to the San Francisco office back in 1999. The first times that I made that drive down to Intel, arguably the most important company in the history of Silicon Valley (although some might argue for HP or Cisco, or perhaps someday Google), I felt like I was at the center of the world, and the business world was full of possibility. Now when I make that drive, it's the memories that I think about, not the future.

My usual lunch at SJC used to be a tuna sandwich from Noah's, but since I've given up seafood I got a veggie burrito from Senor Jalapeno instead, which was perfectly serviceable and undistinguished, except for the salsa, which was nicely garlicky. On my layover I went to French Meadow, which I have previously rated as my favorite airport restaurant anywhere in the world (although the Wolfgang Puck Cafe in Cincinnati is a close competitor - nothing at all like the Wolfgang Puck in Concourse B of O'Hare, which is absolutely disgusting). This time I had a bowl of Thai Vegetable Curry soup, which didn't seem particularly Thai (or curry, for that matter), but was full of vegetables and was reassuringly spicy in a hot-and-sour sort of way.

Paris to the Moon

I haven't done any traveling since my last adventure returning from California, so I don't have any new restaurant reviews, but I didn't want to let the year slip away without some final thoughts. And since so much of this blog has been about Paris, I thought I would finish 2007 with the book I'm reading, Paris to the Moon, a collection of New Yorker articles and other essays by Adam Gopnik, an American who moved to Paris with his family from 1995 to 2000. (The copy I have in front of me belongs to John S., one of the founders of my company, who lent it to John R., another founder who moved to Paris for six months this year, before coming back to become CEO again in a story that will have to be told someplace else. It was John R. I went to the Bistrot du Dôme with in May.)

To be brief, Gopnik captures, at least in part, the magic of being in Paris for an American. The fact that I was depressed there thirteen years ago doesn't mean that I don't love the city. To be melodramatic, Paris is a bit like the girl you had a crush on but only went out with once; the crush never complete goes away.

Some Americans look for the romantic Paris of the late nineteenth century, or of photographs by Robert Doisneau. Not I. I always liked the things about Paris that seemed more modern than, or just different from, the U.S., like the subdued electronic music that Europeans use to set off the advertisements or the weather from the rest of the newscast. It's a difference I had never read about before this book. For example:

There is a separate language of appliance design in France ... Things are smaller, but they are also much quieter and more streamlined. ... They are all slim, white, molded, with the buttons and lights neatly small, rectangular, and inset into the white plastic. The hulking, growling American appliances we had at home ... all were solid, vast and seemed to imply survivalism. You could go cruising in them. The French appliances, with their blinking lights and set-back press buttons on the front, imply sociability and connection.

Throughout the book there are moments like that, which capture not just what it is like to live in Paris, but what it is like to be an American knowing that you are only in Paris for a short time and will never, ever be a true Parisian. There are the obligatory articles about French food and cooking, but they include a portrait of Alice Waters and California Cuisine as good as any I have ever read. ("Over time, an obsession with sex and drugs slid imperceptibly into an obsession with children and food.") The author even cooked seven-hour lamb for Alice - if I recall correctly, the same dish that my friend Jay ordered in Wajda during my trip in October. And then there are the hilarious analyses of the differences between American and French attitudes, like the substitution of the American fact-checker with the French "theory-checker" ("Just someone to make sure that your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren't any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream.")

I'm sure there are other books on the topic, and better ones no doubt. But this is the book that I happened to read, and I give it 2 stars.

The Year in Review

La Farine - 3 stars
Solano Ave., Berkeley, California

I woke up this morning in Berkeley, California, my favorite town in the whole world (I stayed with my friends Robert and Jenni and saw their 2-month-old son Evan, and also so my friends Ori and Lori, and their daughters Hannah and Ruby). For breakfast I stopped at La Farine on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley for a morning bun, perhaps the best breakfast pastry in the world (the other competitor would be a good croissant au beurre in France) - the top is light and fluffy, the bottom is dense and sweet, and I can never figure out which one I like more. Then I drove to the airport for my last flight of the year, back home to Amherst, Massachusetts.

Every year I keep track of every trip I take. Yes, I know it's a bit obsessive. This year I flew 48 times (if there's a layover, I count both legs together as one; but round-trips count as two) on nine airlines through 21 airports in three countries (the US, the UK, and France). I spent 38% of my work days away from home. (If I leave one morning at a reasonable hour and come home the next day at a reasonable hour, that counts as only one day away, but if I leave at 6 am and come home at midnight the next day, that counts as two - really I'm measuring time spent away from my family.) I flew to California 10 times for work (11 if you count the time I went while on vacation, but took my daughter into the office to explain our financials to a potential investor for two hours, while she played on the floor), including four weeks in a row in July when I was filling in as our financial forecaster.

This is considerably down from some earlier years. 2003 was the toughest, when I flew 107 times (more than twice a week), spent 62% of my work days away from home, spent 17 hours per week in transit, and ate 16% of my meals in airports or on airplanes. (I used to keep more statistics.) That was the year I was launching our first customer project in southwest Michigan. And then there was 2002, when I spent essentially every other week in California.

There are many people at my company who travel much, much more than I do. There are the implementation consultants who spend four days every week at a client site, every week of the year (except for vacations). Some of them even go on long-term assignments to places like Russia and New Zealand. There are the Australians, who travel regularly to Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, and Japan. There is the head of international operations, who alternates between home in Australia and our European offices in London, Paris, and Munich. And there is our CEO, who lives in Boston and runs a company based in California with customers and prospects on every inhabited continent.

On the whole, I don't like traveling. It's physically tiring, especially in the business world where you do so much flying in the early morning or the evening to maximize meeting time. It's bad for your sleep, especially staying in hotels with soft mattresses or erratic heating and cooling systems. It's terrible for the environment - my share of my airplanes' carbon emissions this year will be 10 to 20 times the emissions generated by my little Chevy Prizm. As readers of this blog know, you eat enough mediocre food for a lifetime, especially if you don't eat land animals. And most importantly, it keeps you away from your family.

But there are a few modestly redeeming characteristics. I get to visit friends I would never see otherwise. Occasionally I get to eat at Berthillon. I get to escape the New England winter for an occasional few days in California. And sometimes an airplane flight, or even a long car drive, can offer a brief moment of peace and relaxation.

With that in mind, here are my unsolicited, random, and unprioritized travel tips:

• Take advantage of being disconnected. Don't use a BlackBerry. Don't check email on your layover; let it wait until you get home. If you get home in the evening, let it wait until the morning.
• iPod.
• Stock up on episodes of This American Life (thislife.org) for car trips or plane flights. You can get the podcast for free, or you can buy any episode for about a dollar (both in iTunes). We spend so much of our lives in our own narrow little worlds, most of which revolve around our jobs. This American Life reminds you that you are part of a much larger world of lots and lots of different and interesting people.
• Read books, not newspapers or magazines. Periodicals make you feel like you're just barely keeping up; every day or week there's a new one to read. Books are more interesting and fulfilling.
• If you go someplace interesting, give yourself an extra day or a few extra hours to look around. Do it after your work is done, or the time will just get sucked up preparing for your meeting.
• If you're in a place with good restaurants, go eat someplace nice. (Search for "[city name] best restaurants" in Google, and you're likely to find a magazine with a list.)
• Skip breakfast and sleep fifteen minutes more.
• Carry your own tea bags.
• Look up old friends in the places you visit. Seeing someone you haven't seen in years can make for any amount of travel hassles. (They can also tell you where to eat.)
• Help out other travelers, like single mothers with infants and tons of stuff. Swap your aisle seat for a middle seat so a family can sit together. It will make you feel happier.
• Sleep when you can.

Postscript

I composed the above while on my first leg, from San Francisco to Chicago. On landing at O'Hare, I learned that my flight to Hartford was canceled, the next flight to Hartford was canceled, and I had been rebooked at 6.30 am tomorrow. There were no flights home via Washington, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, or Philadelphia, and while I was talking to the rep the 6.30 was canceled, so I rebooked at 1.20 pm tomorrow. Then I called back and switched to a flight this evening to White Plains and booked a one-way rental car to Hartford. But when I got up from booking the rental car the White Plains flight had been canceled, so now I'm on the 1.20 again.

So make that 39% of work days away from home.

Post-postscript

The 1.20 actually left on schedule, but when I landed in Hartford my car was buried in snow, with the wheels trapped in 18-inch snowdrifts and about ten feet of unplowed snow to cover (in reverse) before reaching the plowed aisle in the parking lot. It took over half an hour of digging, with an ice scraper, no less, and would probably have taken another half hour were it not for two nice people who helped push the car over the unplowed snow. Alex would say it was karma, because on the flight from San Francisco to Chicago I helped a woman with her bags because she was traveling with a baby.

Then it started snowing, and halfway home I pulled over because the freeway was too dangerous. Luckily it stopped within an hour or so and I was able to make it home around 8.15 pm. And that really is it for traveling this year.

New York, New York

Aquavit - 3 stars
65 E 55th St.

Aquavit is, according to New York Magazine, the 9th-best restaurant in New York City. (New York Magazine isn't a particularly trustworthy source, but Aquavit also got 3 stars (out of 4 - almost no one gets 4) from the New York Times. As such, Aquavit is also precisely the kind of restaurant I couldn't afford to eat at when I lived in New York from 1997 to 1999. Although I wasn't as poor as I had been when I lived in Paris, a first-year McKinsey associate's salary ($90,000 back then; probably at least $160,000 now) didn't go as far as you might think, especially not in Manhattan. Of New York's 101 best restaurants (again according to New York Magazine), I believe I only ate at two (maybe three) while I lived there. (Of course, many of the 101 didn't exist eight years ago.)

So on Tuesday, after a midtown sales call in the morning, the team and I went to Aquavit for lunch and had a great time. An aquavit is basically a flavored Swedish vodka. Susan and I each had the raspberry lime ginger, which was long on raspberry but generally pleasant; John had the pear, which was delicious; and Corbett had the mango lime chili, which had far too much chili pepper to be enjoyable. The food was mainly nouveau Swedish and American with an emphasis on mouth-popping flavors. I had a long, thin lobster roll wrapped in what looked like a moo shu pancake, topped with tiny baby cilantro leaves that were more pungent than any cilantro I had ever had, and tiny flecks of bacon (I didn't realize it came with bacon, and yes I ate it). Each piece of bacon was about one millimeter square, and there were only about six of them, but you could taste them distinctly next to the lobster and cilantro. I also had hot smoked trout, which was as tender as sushi, and a mainstream but delicious pear tart with apple ice cream.

And the sales call went well, so we were all in a good mood. We had very little time to prepare, so we came up with a plan, avoided a last-minute crunch, and stuck to the plan during the meeting. One of the keys to happiness is doing things that you like doing, and people like doing things they are good at. I'm good at my job (most of it, at least). It's not the world's most interesting job, but that's something.

Kit-Kats?

I'm just back from a short business trip to visit one customer and to make one sales call. I flew from Hartford to Louisville, had an all-day meeting in Louisville on Tuesday, flew to New York on Tuesday night, went to a sales call Wednesday afternoon, took the train to my parents' house, where I stayed Wednesday night, and drove home on Thursday.

My meals went something like this:

• Monday lunch: Two Kit-Kats in the car on the way to the airport, then a slice of really bad pizza at the aptly named Last Resort in the United/US Airways concourse of the Hartford airport. The Last Resort is one of the few holdovers from the bad old days of airport food - unappetizing, unhealthy, overpriced, and generally dismal.
• Monday dinner: A grilled cheese sandwich and Cajun fries from Five Guys in the DC airport. Five Guys looks like the East Coast version of In-N-Out (the best burger chain in the world), with a cheerful assembly line of people making burgers to order, and where the "grilled cheese" is just a cheeseburger without the burger. I had mine with tomato and fried onions, and it came off the griddle dripping with some kind of grease, but it was absolutely delicious. The fries were dusted with some kind of reddish seasoning, and they were yummy too. But note the absence of any vegetables all day.
• Tuesday lunch: Cheese, tomato, and lettuce sandwich from the buffet at the customer meeting, a characterless pasta salad, and a bag of potato chips. There are some places where it's harder to be a vegetarian than others.
  
• Tuesday dinner: A "Caprese" (apparently pronounced "caprice") sandwich at Quizno's in the Louisville airport while waiting for a much-delayed flight to New York. I've found that if you add hot peppers to any toasted cheese on bread, you can generally eat it.

On Monday night I slept in a Courtyard by Marriott that was fine in all respects, except that the thermostat didn't work, so I had a choice between constant heat or no heat on a sub-freezing night. Many people say the most important thing in a hotel room is the bathroom. For me, it's a distant third, at best. First is the bed. And second is the heating or cooling system, because you also don't want one that wakes you up every time it turns on at night.

On Tuesday night, after landing at LaGuardia at 11.45 pm, I slept on the couch of a college roommate in his apartment in Manhattan. Curtis has lived in the same apartment for about fifteen years (I lived in the same building for two years in the late 1990s), even though he now works for a hedge fund. That's one of the things I like about Curtis. And his alcohol collection, although I didn't find the collection of high-end Scotch until the morning. So instead I had Southern Comfort on the rocks while I looked out his windows at the skyline.

I can't be done with travel soon enough.

The City

Sushiya - 2 stars

28 W 56th St.

Pret a Manger - 3 stars (for the brownie)

630 Lexington Ave. (at 54th)

The Oyster Bar - 1 star

Grand Central Station

Growing up in a suburb of New York, it was just "the city." This may be true for people growing up in any suburb of any city, but for New York, the greatest city in the world, it seems especially appropriate. As a child, I always assumed that when I grew up I would live in Manhattan, because that's what you did when you grew up.

I did live in Manhattan, for a brief two years after graduate school. I doubt I will ever live there again. Driving across the Triborough Bridge on Wednesday morning on the way to LaGuardia and seeing the skyline of Manhattan unfold on my right, I remembered how much I loved the city, how much I missed it, and yet how familiar it is to me. The drive from Chappaqua to the city is one I can feel in my bones and my nervous system, from years of going to and from Juilliard every weekend. But in many ways Manhattan today is not the city I knew growing up - so much richer, more fashionable, and less threatening than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Back then Grand Central was a place you raced through on the way to catch a train; this evening there were long lines of expensively dressed people waiting to get into the restaurants that were put in as part of the renovation in the late 1990s. The New York I remember was much more like the endless, gray, non-descript sea of buildings that you descend into on the Queens side of the Triborough Bridge, or the tangled interchanges I got lost in in Harlem on the way back to my parents' house on Wednesday night. It was a bustling, dirty, commercial city built for ordinary people, not the international shopping mall that now blankets much of midtown Manhattan.

For lunch I flashed back only ten years and went to Sushiya with my college roommate Curtis, who now works at - where else? - a hedge fund. When I worked at McKinsey, Sushiya was one of the reasonably good sushi places that one might order dinner from when working late. And it was reassuringly satisfying, the eel not smothered in sauce, the rolls allowing multiple distinct flavors to come through, the fish as soft as butter in the mouth.

My mid-afternoon snack was from a welcome addition to the new Manhattan - Pret a Manger, the British chain that readers will recognize from the previous post - where I had a chocolate brownie that was absolutely to die for, for only $1.49, a meltingly soft yet dense square of pure chocolate goodness, not overwhelmed by sugar.

And dinner was a relic of Manhattan past, with my high school friend Fred in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central - which was once probably the only restaurant in what is not a massive food court. The lobster stew was decent, and the martini was a little small, and I'm sure the crowd was much bigger than it used to be, but it was still distinctly New York.

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.