Behold the Power of Trends, and a LONG Tangent

This post was supposed to include some nice pictures of last Friday's dinner. (OK, it still could, for reasons I'll discuss below, but bear with me for the moment.) On Friday evening, after work, I met up with my sister Lauren and my brother-in-law Brian to have dinner at The Meatball Shop, a fairly new (opened in February) and significantly buzzed-about Lower East Side restaurant specializing in (no points for guessing this one) meatballs. The menu includes five different kinds of meatballs (beef, pork, chicken, veggie, and a weekly special), and you can order any one of the types in a variety of ways including a variety of different types of sandwiches or a la carte, as well as various sides and beverages and all that.

So, of course, meatballs are delicious, and we decided we wanted to give it a try. The reviews mentioned that there could be a long wait for a table, but we figured that we could always put our name down, leave a phone number, and then go get a drink at a bar nearby. But when we arrived, we were told that the wait would be a whopping two hours! OK, really, come on. I'm sure these meatballs are very good, but are they really that much better than what you get on a meatball sub at your local pizza place (my coworkers and I sometimes go to Liberatos Pizza in the Financial District) that that kind of a wait is justified? I mean, I'm not averse to waiting a reasonable amount of time for food. 45 minutes in the park waiting for my burger from Shake Shack? No big deal. Line outside Tomoe Sushi? I haven't been there yet, but everyone says it's worth the wait. But two hours for meatballs? Well, we didn't think they could possibly be worth the wait, and decided to head somewhere else.

After a bit of wandering, we wound up at a cute little place called The Pink Pony and decided to give it a try. (It didn't hurt that they had a sign saying "we have air conditioning!" and it was really hot outside.) Lauren ordered a nicoise salad, Brian ordered short ribs, which both looked very good. (Brian loves short ribs, so there wasn't much doubt that he'd be happy, and the tuna in Lauren's salad was nicely seared.)

I ordered cassoulet, which I'd never eaten before, but had been meaning to try for a while because: So after I took the bar exam back in the summer of 2006, I took a vacation to Europe for a few weeks. One travel day, when I was taking a TGV train from Bordeaux to Barcelona (or, technically, to Narbonne to transfer to a different train to Barcelona), I got, well, stranded. The train just stopped working with no explanation. (Well, there might have been some explanation, but not an explanation that I was going to be able to pick up on with my "Ou est la toilette?"-level understanding of French.) At first we were just stopped basically in a field, but after being held there for something like an hour we pulled forward at a slow speed until we arrived at the nearest station, in a small town named Castelnaudary. There we sat for... a few hours, as I recall. I still didn't really know what was going on, only that it was starting to look more and more like I was going to miss my connection. They were letting people off the train, though, so I got up to stretch my legs and eventually found out, from an English-speaking conductor (SNCF conductors wear little national flag pins representing various languages they speak, which I thought was clever), that there was some sort of electrical problem, that they didn't know how long it would be, but that they would make sure that everyone did get where they were going if we missed connections. (I later learned that all the electricity in southwestern France was not working that afternoon; I'm not sure whether that meant just for SNCF, or for everyone in the whole region.) I managed to call my hotel in Barcelona to let them know that I would be arriving late that night (the Spanish that I had learned in high school and college was, and still is, rusty but at least somewhat functional), and then settled in to wait. I couldn't really go anywhere, though, because there was no telling when the train would be ready to leave, and in any case I couldn't really communicate with anyone to figure out where I'd go even if I could go somewhere. The train eventually left Castelnaudary a few hours later and arrived in Narbonne close to midnight, something like five or six hours after I was supposed to make my transfer. SNCF, true to their word, put me and a bunch of other Barcelona-bound travelers onto a bus that eventually arrived at around 3 in the morning, and someone at my hotel (formerly Hostal Palacios, now Hotel Praktik Rambla, highly recommended) was there to let me in even at that late hour.

Aaaaaanyway, if you'll forgive the rambling (though this is all actually part of a much longer story that I'm certainly not going to go to the effort to type), the connection is: after I got home at the end of my trip, I decided to read up on Castelnaudary, where I had been stranded for a couple of hours. It turned out that what seemed to me to be a crappy little town in the middle of nowhere (to be fair, not many places look particularly nice if all you see is the train station) was actually a lovely town along the Canal du Midi that bills itself as the "World Capital of Cassoulet." Had I known this at the time, I would've certainly tried to find a place to eat cassoulet rather than whatever crap I found in a vending machine at the train station, but since I didn't, I've been meaning to try it for a while, and now here we are back at where we started.

So, cassoulet. Tasty. Beany. Should've taken pictures, like I mentioned above. I think I'm going to need to try it elsewhere for comparison.

The end? Perhaps, though I do still want to go try those meatballs some night when the line isn't so long.