• We retract our earlier eyebrow-raise over David Tamarkin’s official review of Randy Zweiban’s Province — now that Pat Bruno has also visited, we suppose we’ll bow to the consensus. And this is certainly not a knock on Province, but holy goodness Bruno’s review is so boring. He professes deep love for the restaurant — everything he samples is a hit — but slogging through paragraph after paragraph of tepidly measured praise is just bleh. Maybe it’s his overreliance on the passive voice. “This was good. This other dish was also good. Additionally, another good dish was tried.” ACTIVE VOICE. IT IS YOUR FRIEND. Also, synonyms for “dishes”!
• As long as we are wearing our Cranky Hat — and before any of you loyal readers ask us when we are not wearing our Cranky Hat, please know that our Cranky Hat is mutually exclusive with our Extremely Excited Hat and our Stalking The Alinea Staff Hat. So yes, we demonstrably are sometimes not wearing our Cranky Hat — anyway, as long as we are wearing our Cranky Hat, we are curious why Bruno (or his editors!) saw fit to put quotes around the word “joint” in the headline of his roundup of sub sandwich shops. “Joint” is not quoted when it is used within the article. If it were not quoted in the headline we would not mistakenly believe that the article was about marijuana rolled in paper or a point of connection between two bones, no more than we would expect that the word “subs” referred to underwater boats or Mrs. McDonnell during 7th period. But no matter. Bruno lists his five favorites for “a fine sub sandwich” and — Mike Nagrant probably saw this coming — every single one of them is an Italian sandwich shop.
Bonus! If you email Bruno your picks for your favorite sub shop, two people chosen at random will win a copy of his Chicago-style pizza cookbook, first published before we were out of diapers!
[Photo: A sub at Bari, one of Bruno’s picks, via onlyonelifecd’s Flickr
