done.

frigging expensive touristy dim sum place, but i’ve heard the dim sum is quality here.

should go on Thursdays, cause that’s when it’s closest to our office.

Pop up ramen shop

Also linked to from this reply on chowhound.

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Old, but this article about the guy who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator came up in conversation today. It’s a very well-written piece on what might otherwise be a banal subject.

The story of how a Absolut-quality vodka became the super-brand known as Grey Goose. If you’re going to spend that much on vodka, go for the Belvedere and/or Chopin.

…though to be fair, Le Poire does shoot oh so smoothly.

To the business at hand. The year is now 1996, and, flush with Jager’s success, you’re ready to invent a new vodka from scratch. Why? Because the microbrewed-beer craze is giving way to a new age of sophisticated cocktails. Dot-com dollars are begging to be spent ostentatiously, at expensive nightclubs. Herein lies opportunity.

As you lean back in your golf cart, watching another perfect chip shot bounce up onto the green, you ponder the fact that the premium vodka right now (in 1996) is a brand called Absolut. When it was first introduced, Absolut’s high price was considered outrageous. But it’s had great success (with its iconic, artsy ad campaign), and it now sells for the steep, steep price of about $17 a bottle.

So, to steal away Absolut’s market share, your unborn new vodka should undercut this price, correct? No, you think, chomping your cigar as you watch a 30-foot putt roll straight into the cup. Why don’t I price my vodka extravagantly higher than Absolut, at wildly more profitable margins … and steal Absolut’s market share that way? This was the great insight of Sidney Frank (and not only him: The makers of Ketel One vodka had the same basic idea). Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. Here were all these vodkas, in the $15-to-$17 range, vying to be the premium brand (with Absolut mostly winning). Frank just sidestepped the fray altogether and charged an unheard-of $30 a bottle. The markup amount was pure profit. “He was the first person to see,” says an executive at rival Bacardi, “that there was a superpremium category above Absolut, if you had a good product story.”