Annual Heckasac Rant

In my last review for SNR, of Kotteri Ramen Bar in Elk Grove (which has decent ramen and really good tsukemen), I started it with a rant about how "real" cities can support listicles such as Eater.com's 13 best ramen shops in San Diego. We are smaller than San Diego, but we basically have two ramen places, Shoki and Ryu Jin.

Now they just listed 18 (18!) "splendid shakshukas" in the Boston area. Shakshuka is an egg-and-tomato dish that got trendy YEARS AGO, and a search of Yelp yields 1, that's right, 1, place to get it in Sac (Pushkin's). Oh, all right that weird Seasons 52 place at Arden Mall too. Boston is quite a bit bigger, but proportionately we should have....let me do some imaginary math....5-8 places to get this dish that has been trendy so long that it has now jumped the shark, yet never came here.

That is what bugs me, not that we are not trendy, that's fine, but that when good food and drink trends happen (like natural wine), they never come here and instead we get like 10 places riffing on the same trend or concept. And meanwhile, in the rest of the country, the trend builds, reaches saturation, is declared over, and on the the next thing, and there still isn't one restaurant where I can consistently get a glass of delicious natural wine, or shakshuka, or I have to go to the one ramen place over and over and over.

On another topic, I'm not always a fan of Marcos Breton, but this story is chilling on the subject of what sexual assault survivors go through, and also a wonderful profile of this brave woman. It is hard to take that her story was doubted, mainly because she got a ride to UCD campus from her attacker.