Archive for category food
An Anniversary Dinner at Il Fornaio
Posted by Bob Kumagai in That's Life, food on June 2nd, 2009
Not all dinners out are created equally. The good folks at the Il Fornaio in the Denver Tech Center made that abundantly clear last night as my wife and I celebrated our 23rd anniversary. In this particular case, the food was fine – not great, but really pretty good. What made for a lovely evening was the attentive and warm service – thank you Cesar. The dining room was nearly empty – the restaurant is a pretty big house with the outdoor patio empty due to the nasty weather and only a large party in a private room and perhaps a half-dozen other tables filled. The number of staff was close to the number of guests. Monday night is always quiet in the restaurant business but with the worries over the economy keeping people at home and away from both white tablecloth as well as quick service joints, it was really quiet.
Il Fornaio is a chain of 21 restaurants across the country – they do a nice job of providing America’s suburbs with a reasonable alternative to the dreck that gets slung at most Italian-concept products (you know who you are). I’m not going to suggest that it compares favorably with Luca d’Italia or Barolo as Denver’s best, but on any given Monday, the bread is crunchy, the pasta al dente and wine list is good.
What we found last night was a quiet and comfortable place to relax, be treated thoughtfully and graciously, and a warm and rich meal to celebrate a married life pretty well-lived so far. I hope that things pick up a bit for Cesar and his restaurant – I’d like to come back.
Twitter Tweaks
Posted by Bob Kumagai in Business, Technology, That's Life, food on April 21st, 2009
It figures. Just when everyone felt the need to have a Facebook page, along comes Twitter to remind you that you are, in fact, well behind the curve. I knew Facebook had reached the popular culture tipping point of practical necessity when my mother-in-law (who is an avid Skype video call user) wondered aloud whether it was necessary to use Facebook to keep in touch with her grandkids. It is. Whether grandma really wants to see the day-to-day drama of the high schoolers or the photographic evidence of the altered states at college is another story.
Now Twitter has grown past the early-adopters and moved into the mass media. At 8 million users and some ridiculous amount of growth every day, the question of whether anyone really wants to read that you’re standing on line at the grocery, or that the french toast is ‘yummy’, has been rendered moot. If enough of your friends and colleagues are using a technology, so must you lest you be tagged a “Luddite“. Now the question is what to post, at what frequency and in which media. The difficulty of managing the non-stop stream of links to interesting articles, ruminations on current events, and promotional announcements has led to the proliferation of tools like Hootsuite, Twhirl, Tweetdeck, and a thousand more. Today’s new flavor is Twibes, where you can throw your remaining individuality into the bin and join (or create) a group of like-minded folks. It’s the segmentation of Twitter and is built-to-order for marketers to reach identifiable groups for push marketing.
What is clear is that thousands and thousands of individuals and businesses are jumping on this platform to avoid being left at the station. Only a few of the folks that I follow appear to have a clear purpose around their use of Twitter – I know I don’t. Even marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter (or Facebook or Flickr or MySpace), for this primary reason:
“I don’t want to use a tool unless I’m going to use it really well. Doing any of these things halfway is worse than not at all. People don’t want a mediocre interaction.”
I work in the online employment and recruiting business. Figuring out how to leverage the multitude of third-party social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. is one of the biggest challenges we face. It is not implausible that online job boards will find themselves swept aside by changing technology in the same way that the newspaper classifieds were kicked to the curb. In the case of newspapers, it took over 150 years to have their employment ad revenue model wiped-out by craigslist and Monster. The online job boards might find that it takes far less time to be left behind. It remains to be seen whether the combined 180+ million users of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter will have an answer to Godin’s challenge of using a tool “really well” and if, at the end of the day, that really matters.
Time For A Buena Vista?
After nearly 50 years and 10 U.S. Presidents, it appears that the Obama administration is taking steps toward thawing the 90 miles of ice between America and Cuba. As one of the last relics of the Cold War, the trade embargo that President Kennedy instituted in 1962 may be heading toward the same scrapheap that contains the statue of Lenin and pieces of the Berlin Wall. Both Raul Castro and BHO are floating the idea of an open conversation around the issues that have been (and will continue to be) so problematic between the two nations. No doubt there is much for Cuba and its regime to gain by re-entry to the OAS, not the least of which is investment dollars flowing into the jalopy of an economy that the Cuban people have suffered under. Let’s hope that there is a pragmatic resolution to this policy dinosaur.
That an end to el bloqueo may be within reach got me to thinking of the great Cuban musicians of The Buena Vista Social Club and how they were largely unable to perform in the U.S. You may recall that in 1996 American producer Ry Cooder assembled a collection of some of Cuba’s greatest jazz musicians of the pre-Castro years for a recording that returned them to international prominence. For most of us, it was an introduction to names like Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Ruben Gonzales and Guajiro Mirabal. Largely forgotten in both Cuba and abroad, the recording resulted in the burnishing of the legacies of these great musicians. Many of them have since passed away; Ferrer, Gonzales, and Compay Segundo won’t be around to see the day that Washington and Havana start speaking to each other again.
I watched the Wim Wenders documentary the other night and was struck by the scenes of the decaying buildings and 50’s era automobiles – Havana looks a bit like an elderly lady wearing an old party dress. Here is a clip of “Chan Chan”. Enjoy
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoQNj2tlZhg