Stranded in Cleveland
Due to a few mishaps, I’m writing this from the airport in Cleveland, where I had a layover and am stranded until the next flight back to Newark, which won’t leave until after 6am. Now that the airport has emptied out, the WiFi is working faster, so I’ve been able to get a little work done at least. Some thoughts follow.
Questions for Alloy Steel International
Some good questions were raised in the comment thread to the previous post about this. I plan to ask all of them in our scheduled call Tuesday night. If you have a question for the company’s management that hasn’t been asked in that thread yet, feel free to leave it there. Feedjit shows some hits to that post from Perth, so perhaps the company is reading the questions in advance of our call.
Another electric vehicle company
Leo Motors (Pink Sheets: LEOM.PK), a Korean EV company, had a booth at the San Francisco Money Show. I asked one of the company’s reps there if the company was profitable and he said it was, but from a quick glance at the company’s 10-Q, other than a currency transaction gain in the most recent quarter, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Here’s a link to the Physics 903 behind their Zinc Air Fuel Cell and Lithium Polymer battery. I’ll see if I can get an electrical engineer’s opinion on whether there’s any “there” there. Leo’s chart:
Gems from Brazil
Also at the Money Show was Brazilian miner Vale (NYSE ADRs: VALE). A blond girl working their booth gave me one of the thermoses they were handing out. I started to ask her about wear plates, but she wasn’t familiar with them. She spoke English without a trace of an accent, so I assumed she was an American employee of the company, until her coworker walked over and she started speaking to him in Portuguese. The Vale booth had a series of plexiglass boxes displaying the different sorts of stuff they mined: iron ore, bauxite, etc. I mentioned that they reminded me of the boxes displaying the raw gemstones at the H.Stern store in Rio, and the girl said, “These are our gems.”
San Francisco area restaurant rundown
Here’s the rundown on the restaurants we went to in San Francisco, on our vacation from the diet, in the order we went to them:
– The Globe. I had gone to this place a couple of times in the late ’90s when I used to go to San Francisco for work fairly often. Monkey Pilot might remember this one too. They had a peach pie they served hot in an individual-sized iron skillet with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. They didn’t have that peach pie this time, but the food was still good and the place is still open late, which is convenient if you get into town late and you’re hungry.
– Barbacco. The best meal we had on the trip, by far. Small plates, but not that small. Excellent from the beginning to the end. Even the Brussels sprouts were delicious. The first of the two restaurants recommended to me by the wine guy at a business event in town.
– Boulevard. George’s favorite. I picked up a couple of matchbooks from there to prove we’d gone there on his recommendation. I’d been to this one in the late ’90s too, for a blur of business dinners. Easily the most expensive meal we had last week. Also the fanciest in terms of preparation. A little too fancy for my taste these days. The restaurant’s in a beautiful old building though, and at George’s recommendation, we sat at the counter where you can watch the chefs work in the open kitchen. That was pretty cool. A couple of girls to our right just ordered drinks and desert and watched the same show. Not a bad idea, actually.
– The Wayfare Tavern. Tyler Florence’s restaurant in San Francisco. We had lunch here — we shared an enormous cheeseburger made with some proprietary blend of grass-fed beef and a side of mac & cheese. Good food, big portions, but really heavy stuff. Not cheap either. Warm popovers served in lieu of bread were a nice touch though, and the fancy mustard-mayo dipping sauce for the fries was good too.
Nice photo of the Wafare Tavern and its environs, via the restaurant’s website
– Chez Panisse Café. The less-expensive, upstairs outpost of Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. Eat locally-sourced produce and save the world, via Alice’s foundation (though something tells me that when Alice isn’t looking, the kids in her Edible Schoolyard program at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School are digging into tasty Big Macs). Soup and salad appetizers were quite good. The ravioli entree was a little light though. The cheese course was good. I was still hungry after the ravioli, but had to wait while the waiter tried to remember the story behind the chunk of blue cheese (monk made it for Caesar, or something like that. “Whatever,” I’m thinking, “Stop pointing your little finger at it and walk away so I can slather some of it on a piece of walnut bread and eat it.”). The most interesting thing here was mint ice cream desert, because that ice cream tasted vividly of mint leaves.
– Sushi Ran. An allegedly spectacular sushi restaurant in Sausalito. This is the second of the two restaurants recommended to me by the wine guy at a business event in San Francisco. Good, but unspectacular, sushi. There’s probably better sushi in San Francisco, and there’s definitely better sushi back home. Wine guy went 1-for-2, which isn’t bad at all.
– Perbacco. The more expensive, fancier, sister restaurant of Barbacco. Good, but stick with Barbacco, where you’ll get more variety, less pretentious food, and save a few dollars to boot. We would have gone to Barbacco instead, but we couldn’t get an early enough reservation to suit my aunt, who lives in the area.
Back on the wagon
Back on a diet before jumping off the wagon again for dinner with George at Balthazar Thursday night and cheeseburgers Friday with Mark Essel, Kevin Marshall, Scott Carleton and someone else Kevin invited at the Burger Joint. Then back on the wagon again.
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