Femme Fermental is spot on about the burger

Femme Fermental’s review just doesn’t fly with me. I get the feeling a more honest review from her would have said “my burger fell apart. booooo” but she felt the need to write more than that so we got more, but a lot of it was nonsense:
1)You will wait to be seated anywhere worth going on a friday night in center city. Complaining about that is either evidence of ignorance or lameness.
2)She says he soft pretzel “actually fell more into the ‘bread’ category, than the “soft pretzel” category.” That just doesn’t make sense. What does that mean? Criticizing a bread product for being bread. goodness.
Having said that my whiskey king was a mess as well – the 8oz burger holds up much better than the 10o. I agree that the foie gras gets lost amid the bacon, blue cheese and really sweet cipollini. It’s also the most tender, flavorful patty of ground beef I have ever had. I’ve eaten both of their burgers and I’ll order the regular burger there many more times but probably not the whiskey king.

Oh, I understand good pretzels. Most in Philly are horrible. The issue I had with the pretzel bit is really that she didn’t to convey any information about how the pretzel failed to impress her. It’s like saying “this burgundy is too much like wine.” Do you have any idea what I mean by that? I don’t either, because I didn’t convey any useful information except that I’m not satisfied with the burgundy. See?

JD – Your analogy is horrible, and you’re missing Dave’s point. Her comment made perfect sense – the pretzel was more like regular bread than a pretzel, and was therefore unsatisfying, even though on its own terms, it might have been a tasty piece of bread.

A more apt analogy would be to say “this burgundy is too much like grape juice.” Which would imply to the reader that the burgundy lacked the complexity and layers of flavor you’d want from a burgundy, and just tasted like smooshed grapes instead. Even though burgundy is really just a type of grape juice.

Dude, you are wrong. My analogy is perfectly apt. Yours is not. Bread is a general category of grain based, cooked and leavened products. A pretzel is a type of bread. Wine is a grape juice based product. It contains alcohol and traces of other substances that are not present in fresh juice.
Saying a pretzel is too much like bread is not saying the texture is off as suggested above. There are other ways a pretzel could be considered “bready” – for instance it could have had too high a crumb to crust ratio. Or it could have been missing that special crust once expects from a pretzel. It could have been the texture of either the crust or crumb. These are all qualities that can distinguish a pretzel from other types of breads. None of us know what her problem with the pretzel was because she did not tell us.

JD, have you heard pizza crust every described as “too much like bread”? It’s a fair criticism of pizza crust, as it is with pretzels. Your animosity toward FF’s bittersweet parting shot at Garces (of whom she’s otherwise a big fan) has been proven to be irrational, and your insistence leads some readers to fear we may see you have a total Femme Fermental meltdown in this thread.

Rory, “bread line” heh heh.