My wife and I literally came off of a mini-BBQ tour of the South (Carolinas, Georgia, Northern Florida) and then hit OMC for the first time, braced for intense disappointment. It ended up feeling totally seamless and up to par. Great hospitality, too.

I presume you've been to OMC Smokehouse in Duluth? My pick for best in the state, although my trips to Animales (pre-bricks and mortar) have also been really good. Can't wait to try the new place. Jellybean and Julia also pretty good, but it's been years since I've been back.

Is there a secret to timing Ted Cook's right? I've had really good meals there and really forgettable ones. Am I right in thinking that they smoke on specific days of the week which would therefore be fresher/better?

I literally just got Borderlands from Hank Shaw - that may be a really good fit. Likewise the José Andrés cookbook for World Central Kitchen...

That looks killer! We just demolished the wheel at our event, people loved it.

Rush Creek is particularly amazing warmed up on a good baguette! A touch of jam optional, but not a bad move.

I would absolutely slot it into the C) category. Also, it's a stellar show. No cliches, beautifully weird, often laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally heartbreaking in a way that sneaks up on you.

Midwest Express was a dream. Flew it from Boston to Milwaukee every chance I got, which was a lot. I think their coach experience was ahead of numerous modern 1st class experiences. Those cookies!!

I don't think the idea of cultivating a loyal core audience exists in the same way (thus, for example, the Washington Post melting down, if you assume Bezos had any goal other than just smashing the paper to bits.) If you're just churning traffic and mining clicks, loyalty is mostly irrelevant.

When I was working in printed-on-paper newspapers (20+ years ago) we would factcheck opinion pieces. An opinion piece premised on distortions or outdated data or straight-up lies discredits the whole paper, or at least that was the thinking.

Honestly more for us than for him, I don’t think he’d fully absorbed what “teddy is lost” fully entailed.

We once drove back 45 minutes while
roadtripping (90 minutes total!) to retrieve a beloved teddy bear from a park. Fortunately the bear was still there!

absolutely worth an amendment

Now I do! I take back everything negative that I wrote!

The ones I know have been bad for 3-4 years by my count - years ago we took our kids with some regularity, but they got so unreliable that we took Noodles out of rotation. No regrets!