Two visits to Bayport BBQ in quick succesion makes me understand why food reviewers go to a place many times before they write a review for publication. My wife and I went for the first time on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving and then again the Tuesday between Christmas and New Years. Our first visit seemed like an epiphany. The ribs were perfect, the pulled pork lovely and the from scratch bread and mix of pickles all of the best quality and flavor. To top it off the owner who was working the cash registar and taking orders was jovial and wonderfully pleasant. We quickly decided we had a new favorite spot. This was especially comforting as since our move from Nordeast Minneapolis to the countryside south of Afton the one thing we miss is the selection of good everyday restaurants.
Our second visit was, to be kind, a mixed bag. There was a group of six or so people in line in front of us and while you could tell they were not comfortable ordering food that wasn't part of a TGI Fridays menu the attitude of woman taking orders wasn't helping. The group was struggling making selections from the menu of items posted to the wall (not a complicated task really) but instead of walking them through it she just waited in silence. Later while eating we heard them talking to each other about not getting what they were expecting, they got what they ordered but didn't comprehend what they had selected. This train wreck in front of us was a bit painful to watch and took a long time to sort out.
We wanted to try some different items off the menu so ordered the pulled chicken sandwich in place of the pulled pork and mac & cheese in place of the baked beans. Because the pickles and ribs were so good we couldn't help but repeat that part of our order from the last visit. I don't know if we happened to have randomly selected the best items on the menu on our first visit or if the quality is just inconsistant but other than the ribs and the pickles our second visit was very disappointing.
The chicken had a nice flavor but was very dry. The fact that it was just chicken and bread didn't leave much room for error and error there was. The BBQ sauce they provide is wonderful but it becomes just a band-aide fix and not a real solution to dry chicken. The real problem however was the mach and cheese. It was awful. It was dry and had no flavor beyond a generic starchy taste which could have come from a Kraft box if you had forgotten to add the powdered cheese packet.
While the ribs were still good they didn't seem to hold our imagination as they had during the first visit. The texture was a little less succulent and the flavor a little less dramatic. They seemed to have suffered from being held too long while waiting to be eaten. The difference in the ribs and the newness of the the restaurant (this is a first attempt by these owners to boot) makes me thing they are having trouble with some of the technical aspects of getting food to customers. It is relatively easy to makes something taste great on your own schedule but immensely difficult to make that same thing at the moment somebody else wants it. A recipe that is perfect in its subtle mix of flavors when tested before being put on the menu might turn into flavorless mush if held for more than a few minutes before being eaten.
While this is all speculation I really hope they pull it together and are able to develop the consistency needed to be worth visiting on a regular basis. I know we will head back again, maybe for take-out this time, but think we will give them a few weeks to work out any bugs. Hopefully our third trip will be more like our first than our second.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Bayport BBQ
Almost Three Years
I started blogging as an experiment. I had been posting on a few blogs and figured it was worth some time to see what it was like managing a blog myself. Both from a technical standpoint and as a diary of sorts. Soon after I got the blog up and running I decided to go back to school and pursue a masters degree while keeping my full time job. Since my last post I have gotten two promotions at work and am three classes and a thesis away from my masters in Evidence Based Design. While I hadn't planned on school taking so long I didn't realize the difficulty involved with both working and taking classes at the same time. Many long hours over many long weeks have been needed to keep everything going and blogs, posting on others or running my own, were not even on my radar.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Spare Change?
The Onion has once again made me laugh more than anybody has a right to. Now I like Obama but this was too funny not to link to . And here is the rest of it.
Time is a tickin'
This is a great article in the NYTimes about making decisions. read the article and then think about how these ideas could be affect very complex systems and decisions. It would seem that the more involved the decisions are the more time spent on average making them and the lower the net reward would be for making the right choice. It seems to me just another reason to decentralize and allow eliminate the number of complicated decisions in favor of allowing people to organize their lives to fit their own circumstances. We should remember these kinds of trade offs when we promote, create or design any type of system, space or object.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
The Ethyl Poisoned Earth
Here is a great piece on one element of our countries environmental history. Since global warming is the favorite environmental topic of the day I think it is important to remember so of the other ways we have affected our globe. This article goes in to a good amount of detail on the introduction of lead into our gasoline supply the damage that followed. A particularly interesting item is how there were quickly concerns about the health affects due to in part workers in ethyl plants dying due to lead poisoning. The Surgeon General Investigated with the following result "The Surgeon General's committee found no firm evidence of a threat to the public, but its members pointed out that its timetable had been insufficient for a thorough investigation, and further studies were strongly suggested. The public took this finding as a clean bill of health, and soon Ethyl was pumping again." It seems like yet another example of how an agency promoted as one that protects citizens was key in prolonging the damage being done. This is similar to the recent Supreme Court case I wrote about earlier where the regulator body approving a product, the FDA in that case, eliminates the culpability of the products producer. This is the never talked about negative of regulation, especially incompetent regulation.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Smoking Ban: Act 2
The Strib has an article about the continued impact that the Theater Exemption is having on the smoking ban. The issue I talked about in an earlier post. Needless to say I think this is both hilarious and important. While I know that at some point the legislature will close this massive loophole I think it is an important example of unintended consequences of regulation. Besides. many of the bar owners have stated that they are doing great business on "Theater Night" which goes to show how wrong many law makers were about the impact this would have on small businesses. The article has also appeared on MSNBC.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Most Important Supreme Court Case in Decades
The Supreme Court handed down a 8-1 decision today that may mark an important inflection point in our regulatory lives. The court sided with Fridley Minnesota based Medtronic in a decision that eliminates a companies liability for personal injury on devices that have been approved by and meet FDA standards. No more suits for coated stents, pacemakers or other devices no matter what kind of damages they have caused, as long as the FDA has approved them anyway. The New York Times has a decent article on the case and it's ramifications.
When the state, in this case the FDA, takes responsibility for "approving" the safety of a product they have in fact made a legal claim that the reward outweighs the risk for that product. That claim must hold true for the products producer as well its user. Therefore if an injury occurs it was an injury that was pre-approved by the government as part of the overall risk/reward equation.
This is the natural progression of a regulatory society. A society in which the government assumes some responsibility away from individuals can, and maybe should, also remove their accountability. The fact that it is impractical to sue the state, the rewards for doing so are very limited, means those injured by a bad medical product are given no recourse. Now imagine what this means not only for the soon to be heard case on pharmaceuticals but other areas where the state has regulatory approval procedures for products. Everything from cars to buildings where government provides a preemptive approval based on certain criteria is going to be open to this same logic.
Two possible directions we may go from here are quite different. There could be a push to eliminate many of the current regulations and allow those creating the products in question to be responsible for the liabilities involved or, agencies like the FDA can drastically increase the rigor of their approval processes. The first would be politically unpopular with those on the left that feel that agencies like the FDA are the only thing between the ogres that produce products for money and mere humans as well as the companies who would become responsible for their own products. Funny how both "sides" in the battle want protection from the same entity. The second is more likely but sure to put a chill into all affected industries as it would increase the cost of producing products and reduce the time in which those costs can be recovered. In turn reducing the number of medical innovations available to all of us.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Connecting the Dots
I found this site that connects the electricity used in a given zip code to coal sourced from mines that practice mountain top removal. This is a great piece for a couple of reasons. Most directly it can show us how the energy we used impacts the environment. Maybe more importantly it is a great example of how easily we can use available information to connect actions to consequences. I can imagine this same idea being used to track all types of products we consume and provide information on their sources. I also figured I would provide a partial solution for those people in my neck of the woods and give people this link that lest everyone know how they can specify purchasing wind generated power from Xcel.
Friday, February 15, 2008
The Gun Control Falicy
Though quite an old article I though it was worth posting in light of the most recent campus shooting. The knee-jerk reaction to these tragedies by some people is to crerate law that allows them to feel as though something is being done. The truth is of course that increasing the restrictions on firearm ownership only keeps law abiding from having guns. No person who is planning to commit such a crime would be dissuaded by such laws. The linked article contrasts crime in London and New York with their much different histories of guns laws and crime, New York has had both higher crime and more restrictive gun laws for decades.
Another, related, development on this issue is the court case of Parker vs. District of Columbia which is being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a case that very well should be the most important 2nd amendment case ever.
I agree that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing (socialist or free market) but the fact remains that we do not currently hav e a free market system of any sort. Saying so seems to place the blame on the market and fails to understand how much our current position is due to poorly designed regulations and past government involvement.
The system has to be fundamentally changed, I just want to make it better rather than worse. To do that we have to be honest about where we have been and what we advocate.
Personally I would suggest the following as a starting point. Create a system that requires all health insurance providers to sell a minimum plan, what that is TBD, that is available to anybody no matter what at a fixed price. The trickiest part will be determining a price for this basic plan. Detach insurance from employment by making all health care costs up to the price of that minimum plan tax deductible if paid for by an individual and not an employer. Then provide vouchers to those who meet income requirements to purchase the basic plan room whomever they choose.
Most people would likely purchase more than a basic plan which helps drive competition between insurers. The fact that even those on a basic plan could pick between providers would encourage insurers to work to make sure those people are satisfied. The key here is that the price set for the basic plan covered the real costs of providing care. We could start paying for this with a tax on plans above that of the minimum.
Having consumers that could potentially be on there rolls their entire lives would be a great incentive for insurers to focus on regular preventative care. The fact that most insurance is provided by employers is the core of our current problem. The provider who knows any particular individual will likely be with a different job and have different insurance in ten years has no incentive to provide preventative care to prevent problems for which they likely will not be responsible.
Single payer is a potential disaster if for no other reason than if it is designed poorly from the beginning or if it ends up being used for political reasons we could really make things worse. It also means that there is little to no recourse for those who receive bad service. If you only have one choice for health care or insurance there is nothing you can do when things go poorly and elections are not often of affective enough to help.