This is not about wine.

I could never afford to sample the more expensive lines of products. I look for the affordable that best suits my taste. I have gone places with people who wanted a certain high cost product and refused to consider anything cheaper, when that one was out of stock. They actually did without because nothing of lower price could substutute, as they informed me. I always wondered if they were just shallow, or if they knew something I did not.

You've eaten at Sophie's, I gather.

Sadie's yes.

Interesting question!

Once upon a time I was much more aware of how the things I had effected people's perception of me. That was when I was poor.

Now that I am comfortable finacially I am almost the opposite.

I like "making do" with less. I like relying on my creativity instead of pre-packaged good taste. I trust myself more and I need less.

It is kind of wierd, the way I am, maybe.

I dress down but most of my clothing cost more than average. I live in a "starter" neighborhood but my dinky house is filled with high quality things. I don't want to replace my 13 year old tattered car. People would probably never guess that I had any money unless they really paid attention.

I suppose at this point I am less a prisoner or maybe I'm just a prisoner of a different kind.

Sadie's, yeah. Well, we've agreed it's not especially memorable, except smoking is permitted since it's outside of Albuquerque, in some technical sense.

Hmmmmm....dunno, really.


I'll mull on it.


The answer will likely be more than I would like to think.

Abuelas in bernalillo was like what you are describing.

LONG lines, good prices, yet.. not even OK food.
Pretty restaurant.. I will give it that. but.. eh. Not impressive.



As for my life decisions being based on what others think is ok, cool, correct, or what have you..
Yeah.

hit me. Im guilty.

Now that I know I am guilty, I have begun changing it.
That process began when we moved here. In the ghetto. Where people should NOT want to live. But i do.

Ok, this thread was not meant to be about price lines or anything like that but rather the attitude about living.
Example 1
My father who lives in Denver has a lawn service. Every year he has to find a new lawn service because he only wants the lawn done on fridays because the neighbors are home during the weekend and he wants to have a really nice looking lawn while the neighbors are home to see it (as if the neighbors give a ratsass.)

Example 2

I was in Leeds GB a few years ago visiting some friends and off we went to the local pup for lunch and a round of darts when I struck up a conversation with a chap and he told me about his car, a Morgan, One of my all time favorite cars. He took me around to his house and opened the garage and there sat a classic 30 year old Morgan in British Racing Green and covered with a sheet. It was immaculate. I asded him if he enjoyed driving it and he told me he only drove it, on clear days, from the garage to the front of his house where he washed it and polished it and then drove it back into the garage and covered it with the sheet again. It had 21,000 miles on the odometer. The fooking car was meant to be driven, to be enjoyed as it was built to do. (My Porsche has 152,000 miles on it)

I love ethnic food best & I figured out a long time ago where the best Vietnamese, Lebanese, Turkish, Cambodian, Ethiopian, Indian, etc, meals were to be had. Forget the decor & don't worry about whether there are tablecloths on the tables or not. Don't get sucked in by advertising or reviews in the papers. Follow the locals. A cafe full of Vietnamese happily eating away generally means great Vietnamese food! I'll often order something that looks scrumptious that someone nearby is eating. "I'll have what they're having!" Sometimes that particular dish is not even on the "Anglo" menu. Food tends to be lot more affordable at these (often) humble cafes, too, than the flasher places.

It's interesting to me how people spend their money in such different ways. Even when it's to conform to outside pressure, everyone does it in different ways. To Boomer, it's wearing nicer clothes. To Dys's father, it's having his lawn done on Fridays.

In my case, it's often related to work. If I'm taking someone to lunch, it's always to somewhere impressive. If I'm eating alone, it's usually fast food. But my real indulgences are almost always for my home and my comfort.

Wellllll, y'all know I'm weird. I lived a life of almost rich kid and then strikingly poor, father without work, oh, 8/11ths of many years, and when he did, for a while, ok.

On my own, I am just interested in food and art and history, whatever, generally from an amateur's view until I was licensed in land arch and planning. But still, as a late starter, basically an amateur.

I met my husband by mistake. In fact I walked into the room totally annoyed.

That was back when a friend and I had a studio/gallery in Venice. Another long story, but we both had rooms in a sort of arty place in Venice, and she wanted to move. I didn't, I had a new-built loft.

But I accompanied her on looking for a place and we wandered into a second story 3500 sq ft place in Venice. Ok, it had seven broken windows. I worked at UCLA and had an ordinary salary. She worked part time, but had an MFA in art and a lot of real estate savvy.
I poured my salary into fixing the electrical box and we nattered the landlord about the windows and the fire escape, and we advertised -

A lot of total petunias answered. I don't mean that re gay, just people we couldn't imagine sharing our space with. Ann told me some people were coming by in the evening. Eh, we'd seen, oh twenty already. I went for a marguerita with work friends. Walked up the stairs, once home, to a small group and Ann talking ernestly. I gathered my wits and noticed the quiet guy...

and soon we had a gallery theater, mostly to all of our detriment.

What we got was a set of life drawing classes, some gallery shows, and a theater group - one of the guys, the playwright, becoming my long time husband. So he was much younger than I, by a decade or so, and so what.

He had a professor whom I eventually met who was one interesting fellow, near two decades older than me. He had, for example, a PBS series, Ceremonies of Innocence. Shakespearean scholar (I know from nothing about Shakespeare, sorry).
We became sort of a triumvirate, once a week or every two weeks...
checking out restaurants all over the Los Angeles metropolitan area, of every culture imaginable. There was the time he had a heart attack after the dim sum at...

Much of what I learned about food was from Harvey Goldstein. The adventure, the discernment, the scoffing, the fun.


Ex and I are long divorced, but we both remember Harvey well.


Rest in peace, perhaps with many many potstickers.

Okay, maybe I'm still not sure what this thread is about.

I certainly don't dress "nicer" by any stretch of the imagination. My clothes look well worn in and comfortable - and I pay a premium to get them like that. I like things to be comfortable.

I guess my "attitude towards living" is that I like nice things but I'm not going to spend any time worrying about keeping them nice. I want things that I can LIVE on/with/in. I'm not all Jeeter Lester tearing stuff up out of idiocy but I want things that wear in without a lot of fuss.

So I guess everything I have is like a Porche with 150,000 miles on it -- and a ding in the door.

(I like Sadies a lot.)

I think, Boomer, the thread is about good food and drink across all kinds of cafes/restaurants - or good anything relative to savvy choices, and the effect of chic.

I think this thread is more than food and drink. To me it is the way we decide on purchaces, how we see our possessions--status symbols for others or, like boomer, fine quality without the obvious price tag. For instance, I can't stand the designer purses with the designer's initials all over the place. I can't remember exactly, but someone like Donna Koran, Dior, whatever. I love good quality and would love to have something by Balenciaga or Fendi or Brahmin, without feeling like a walking advertisement. I love things that last, that are worth the money because they will be around for years to come. I don't have many, infact, I left a lot of those things when I left my ex husband. I don't miss them, but I know that I can replace them if I so choose. Just not as many as before.

When I was younger and very uneducated about the finer things, I would be impressed by big names, thinking they were automatically better. Hah. Sometimes yes, but so often no. I bought a pair of sheets on sale at Bloomingdale's by designer Ralph Lauren. They were garbage, probably made in one of those hell-holes in Southeast Asia.

My mother was very impressed by big names which meant she was wonderfully easy to shop for. I used to buy her candy from Nieman Marcus, knowing she would keep the box on her coffee table for at least a year. It was touching in a way, knowing that she had grown up in poverty and loved to pretend she was wealthy. She was so, sadly, easy to please.

On the matter of champagne, I have always loved it, but now I can't drink the cheap stuff, I have to have good champagne or I won't drink it. That, I think, is a matter of maturing taste.

I wonder who else has fallen for advertising and status over quality. I would guess it would be mostly younger people, much like me when I was young and just learning about the finer things in life--plus pretty stupid about it all until I finally had enough money to learn the difference between quality and being a walking billboard.

Dys, are we getting it yet?

One other thing, Sadies is great for real Mexican food, but El Pinto, which serves only mediocre food, is so beautiful. In the summer at El Pinto, you can sit outside and look out on their gardens full of tropical plants. It is peaceful hearing the little birdies singing and feeling the lushness of the greenery. I will go to a place like that just for the ambience. I know not to order anything special because it will be disappointing. A hamburger is fine as long as I can sit outside.

So, does that make me a food whore? Maybe. So turn on the red light.

And pull up a chair for me...right next to Diane!

Yes, D, I think you've got it. The thread, it seems to me, is about spending money to conform to society's ideas of what is desirable. I think we're probably all at least a little guilty. (She says, wearing her Jil Sander cologne.) But I think you're right. It does lose its grip on us somewhat as we age. Probably because we...okay, I...care less and less what others think of me as the years go by.

I like the "good stuff," but it's more about what appeals to me than what anyone else would think.

I see I was off riffing in outer space about food appreciation. Apologies.


My unexpressed starting point was against dictate.

In the times that Harvey and my ex an I explored Los Angeles, food became something to write columns about, and the odd soon to be famous resturant opened. A few years later, friends from the bay area started sniffin their noses, and then, a few years after that, new york got in gear.

Mostly to the good, except I don't like the little place at nowhere corners ignored - depending, of course, on the cook.

Wait - Shewolf, you live in a ghetto? What kind of ghetto?
I'm smiling because I can understand choosing that.

Dys, I'm guilty more than I wanted to admit.
Always was a point of pride for me to be able to say 'i don't give a damn. I do what I want'.

But..then..I've started to earn myself better money and security. Never had the option before to purchase outside of a certain zone. You know what I am talking about, where every single dollar is accounted for and weighed with deliberation. Five bucks means something. It ain't liquid.

So I've gone a little nuts with purchases. Kid in a candy store. Maybe a month of that and I got bored and kinda sick from it. In the head and heart.

It's been weird with mister. At times, he wants to treat me to something 'outside of the zone', something that cost such-and-such, or existed generally in what I considered 'not my world', and it I would instinctively reply with 'no, no, that's not necessary'.
The implication in my mind being 'it costs a lot, so it is worth a lot, so i shouldn't accept it'.
'I won't fit in. I'm an imposter.'
All that bullshit!

But you know what, I was right all along and didn't quite know it. Some expensive and labelled or famed stuff is crap, some is good, some is mediocre. Whatever.
Some of the people are in it for real and some for show: no different than in anything .
The folks enjoying it or faking their way through it - who gives a ****.
The important things are the same as always.

Still, it took having the option to experience it to test it.
I guess I was under some old idea that money meant you earnt it, y'know? Earnt what you have to show in the world.
Bullshit it is.

I wish all rich folks to be poor in the world for a while, and all poor people to be rich.
Won't change people, but will give the opportunity anyhow. Amplifies a lot of latent tendencies and expectations, I think.

In regards to wine, I actually am interested in it because I like wine. But, since I know next to nothing about it except what tastes good to me and what doesn't, and I am still finding lots of new ones that I like in the cheap range, no need to spend more for now.

Have you seen the australian wine being sold in a can like a can of soda now?
That cracked me up. I had to get some just to see if it tastes better or worse to drink it out of alum.
Have any of you tried it?

Okay... maybe I'm getting it now.... so a couple of tangets:

I always thought one of the most brilliant advertising tag lines ever was "If you want to get someone's attention... whisper".

I had the good luck to work for a man who personified this statement; an elegant, deliberate and generous man who taught me the value of understatment, the whisper of "things". Although he and his wife could afford anything and everything they lived a pretty simple life.

We were often their guests at dinner and I would see him laugh over the very idea of a $60 steak while not blinking over a $300 bottle of wine (and usually ordering a second one).

So I guess it is really about what you love and know and want. He didn't order such things to impress anyone but because it was something that he enjoyed and wanted to share.

I'm sure some people would have been impressed but he would have thought them idiots and never invited them again.

Tangent two coming up.......