Turkey Days

I'm back from Istanbul and it was fabulous.

There was pudding and mosques and cisterns and Germans and pudding and dervishes and coffee and hand sanitizer and bananas and pudding and a strange alien-looking corporate mascot and baklava and mustaches and Ataturk and tiny green plums and fruit-shaped soap and castles and water pipes and fish sandwiches and pudding and rooftop terraces and dreamy sunsets over the Bosphorus and Turkish Delight and things that look like bagels but aren't and Jewish museums and pudding.

I'm still thinking about how I'll treat all this in a full, proper post, but here are some photos to tide you over in the meantime.

Did I mention there was pudding?

Caught by the Turks

Which do you prefer to do?

When traveling someplace new, do you prefer to learn everything you can about a place beforehand - I'm talking not only guide books, but also novels, movies, memoirs, journalism, phrase books, food blogs, think-tank research papers, etc. - so that you can appreciate what you see when you see it, or do you prefer to approach a place with few preconceptions, to do a bit of practical research and then let yourself be surprised by the rest?

I used to do the latter quite frequently - when Jon and I took our rail tour of Europe back in college we were armed with little more than a large "Europe 1997" guide book and a vague notion of what the German word for "thanks" is - but in recent years I've been moving more toward the former. Partly this is because I have more time, disposable income, and access to information (the internet has grown substantially since 1997) than I did when I first started traveling, but I also suspect that I'm slightly less death-defying than I was in my youth, slightly more cautious. I like to know what I'm getting into before I head somewhere unknown. But I also don't want to miss anything, especially if I'm going somewhere that I may never visit again, and I trust others to tell me what to see and think and feel more than I trust myself. This may or may not be a good thing.

So, for instance: Kate and I are going to Istanbul soon. On, like, Monday. We found a cheap flight (traveling is so cheap right now - if you have a little time and still have a job, go play around on Kayak and see for yourself) and we'd never been there before, so that was reason enough. Pretty spontaneous, huh? Maybe even impulsive?

Not so fast: since we got the tickets about a month ago we've been burying ourselves in all things Turkey - and when I say "we" I really mean "I", since, although Kate's been doing her share of research and preparation, she's been exercising a level of restraint that has been completely inaccessible to your humble blogger. This is because, as she says, she doesn't want her experience to be too heavily mediated by others and would like to approach the city on her own terms, but it's also (probably) because she actually has a job, and therefore has other things to keep her occupied. As much as I admire her reasoning, however, I appear to be operating under no such constraints. And it's becoming a bit of a problem.

Here's a sampling of what I've read, in whole or in part, in preparation for this trip:

Guide Books
Rick Steves' Istanbul - this is a bit chatty and hand-holdy, the target audience (apparently) being the sorts of loud, obnoxious American tourists who need to be reminded every few pages to be more respectful and culturally sensitive than they are likely to be. We bought it because it has lengthy descriptions of major tourist attractions whose signage is unlikely to be in English.

Fodors Turkey - a standard guidebook with lots of information about places outside of Istanbul, in case we decide to escape the city.

Lonely Planet Istanbul (tiny edition) - Lonely Planets are best for their food/drink/shopping recommendations, less-good for their info on cultural/historical/sightseeing matters, and this one appears to be no exception. Which is perfectly fine.

Lonely Planet Turkish Phrasebook - Kate's been looking through this one more than I. Turkish is hard! And they've got lots of dots and squiggles on their letters! This I expect will be most confusing for me.

Non-Guide Books (already read)
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book - a novel by Turkey's most famous modern novelist that evokes a dreamlike Istanbul heavy with snow and melancholy, a novel (and a city) not for the faint of heart or the short of attention span.

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul - a memoir by Turkey's most famous modern novelist that evokes a dreamlike Istanbul heavy with snow and melancholy, etc.

Scott Malcolmson, Borderlands - a work of journalism by an American traveling through Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Uzbekistan immediately after the fall of communism, just as new (or long-dormant) ethnic nationalisms are beginning to arise.

Non-Guide Books (not-yet read)
Mary Lee Settle, Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place - terrible title, but I found it used, and it looks like a potentially interesting description of Turkey by an outsider who's spent a lot of time in the country.

Francis Yeats-Brown, Caught by the Turks - great title, by a soldier who was captured by the Ottomans during WWI. Came across this one while doing research about India - Yeats-Brown also spent lots of time in the Indian army and wrote about his experiences, most famously, in Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul - a novel examining, I think, the legacy of the Armenian genocide for a couple of Turkish families. Kate read it, but I haven't.

Films
"Across the Bridge" - a documentary about contemporary music in Istanbul, hosted by a very unintentionally comic German musician.

"Takva: A Man's Fear of God" - about a simple, holy man who is forced to confront the modern world and doesn't handle it too well.

"Head-On" - (haven't-yet-watched) about Turkish immigrants in Germany.

"The Edge of Heaven" - ditto

Websites
Too many to list, but here's a sampling:

James Fallows on whirling dervishes, in The Atlantic (from Joey).

The NYT's Frugal Traveler goes to Turkey.

Ottoman Empire T-Shirts (we are so going here!)

Istanbul Eats (food blog)

Cafe Fernando (another food blog)

Hurriyet, one of Turkey's major newspapers (in English!).

Analysis and reporting on contemporary Turkish politics at Opendemocracy.net.

Turkey's Dark Side, a paper by the European Security Initiative on the underside of Turkish democracy.

And so on...

By this point, I've read/seen so much about the place that I kind of feel like I don't even need to go there. But I will, and it'll be great, and I predict that there will still be one or two things that'll surprise me. I may not have gotten the balance between ignorance and preparation completely right this time, but that's okay. A new city is a new city, and if you don't know somebody there who's local and can show you around, you've got to rely on your own wits and instincts - and there's nothing wrong with honing those wits and instincts with lots and lots (and lots) of research.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Green Street Cafe

Sunday was Mother's Day, and Mother's Day means brunch. And brunch, in my world, means french toast. So it was pretty much a given that I would spend the morning of Mother's Day munching on pan-grilled bread drizzled with syrup. Never mind that my mother is several thousand miles away - I'm sure that if she had been here, she would have wanted to be taken to brunch, and, had that been the case, I would probably have taken her to the Green Street Cafe, which stands about a block from my apartment, just across the street from Smith College.

So it was in honor of both of our absent mothers that Kate and I ventured out yesterday morning, timing our visit to coincide with the opening of the cafe at 10am, reasoning, not without reason, that the place would quickly fill up with people who had made the same Mother's Day plans as we did, albeit accompanied by their actual mothers.

Sure enough, when we walked through the door the jolly, white-haired, ponytailed man that greeted us said to Kate, "Well you don't look old enough to be a mother!" Which is not strictly true - a woman in her late 20s, no matter how youthful looking, could certainly be a mother (indeed, back home it's practically required) - but I suppose he may have meant that she didn't look old enough to be my mother, which is certainly true. Though I'd humbly submit that my actual mother doesn't look old enough to be mother, either. But that's neither here nor there.

As it happened, the cafe wasn't very busy, although a steady stream of families did file in while we dined. This gave us an opportunity to contemplate the most striking feature of the Green Street Cafe, a vibrant mural that takes up an entire wall along the cafe's west side. The mural, called "Last Staff Supper at Green Street Cafe," is modeled on Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and depicts a group of people - cafe employees and owners - gathered around a Christ-ish figure holding a blueprint. Here are some photos I took; better ones are here.



The artist, Jeff Mack, painted it to raise awareness of the long-festering dispute between the cafe and its landlady, Smith College. It's a classic town-gown quarrel: the college, which owns the cafe as well as most of the surrounding neighborhood, is building a new engineering building that's disrupting business and threatens eventually to obliterate the block of buildings in which the cafe sits. The cafe's parking lot has been closed for nearly two years due to the construction, as has its outdoor patio, and this, say the owners, has cost the cafe some 75% of its business. The mural was painted almost three years ago, when the dispute began, but things are only now starting to get settled - in March the cafe owners filed a lawsuit, and in April a judge found in favor of the college. Smith promises to look after the interests of the neighborhood, but the cafe's lease runs out in 2012, after which the Green Street Cafe could well cease to exist.

Which would be a shame, because it's a very friendly place that serves some very wonderful food. They grow a lot of their food in their own gardens and buy most of the rest locally - the menu said that they have a "Locavore Rating" of 4 out of 5, which sounded pretty good to us ("locavore," I believe, is Spanish for "crazy eater") - and the menu changes often to reflect whatever food is in season.

And the french toast, I'm happy to report, was wonderful. It may just be that, after my recent diner experiences, anything that didn't taste like mushy-egg-burp would inevitably taste magically delicious, but I'm pretty sure most objective observers would agree with me. The bread was a sort of chewy sourdough, light and crispy and (for the most part) not too gooey, the syrup was not only real but also warm, which is an innovation of which I heartily approve, and the overall taste was sweet and flavorful. My principal complaint is that there wasn't enough of it, and, for that reason, the Lone Wolf retains the lead. But the Green Street Cafe easily takes it place among the runners-up, sharing a spot with the Esselon Cafe and Haymarket as a purveyor of Almost-Perfect French Toast.



This prompts me to suggest to the owners of the cafe what seems, to me, a fairly obvious solution to their dispute with Smith: drop the lawsuits and instead invite the college administration over for some free french toast. Call it the "We Love Smith College French Toast Gala," get someone like Rachel Maddow or Judith Butler to come give a keynote address, and they'll be all, "Wrecking ball? What wrecking ball? Here's a lease until 2062!"

Seriously, y'all. Try it. Just try not to drizzle syrup on that lease.

Why I Love the ODNB

Occasionally I take a break from eating french toast to actually do a bit of work. This is, after all, what I'm getting paid for. Sort of. I'm a pretty self-motivating kind of fellow, but without deadlines or time pressure or even much of a regular schedule that would force me to squeeze in a specific amount of research-work per week, it's difficult to make much headway. And then what headway I make is very hazy and ill-defined: one of the drawbacks of being an academic is that, apart from the teaching (and frequently even then), we don't produce much in the way of deliverables. Which is to say that we very rarely see tangible, quantifiable products arise from our labor in the way that, say, a newspaper editor might, or an assembly-line worker. It took me about eight years to produce my first book (which still hasn't been published, though I'm assured it will appear soon), and that was with something like three years in which I was technically doing nothing, or nearly nothing, other than working on it. Heaven knows how long it'll take to produce the next one, what with all the teaching and committee work I'll be doing, to say nothing of the country band Kate and I will be starting once we arrive in Nashville.

But that's not really what I want to talk about this morning.

My current project involves, in part, investigating the lives and careers of the men who ran the British Empire. The overall project is a sort of comparative thingy looking at how the British state understood and responded to communal violence in Ireland and South Asia (that's how I put it in my fellowship proposals, anyway). This means looking at who was governing a particular spot where rioting was taking place, what their prior experiences would have been before they arrived there, and, crucially, whether any of the administrators in India had any experience in Ireland (or vice versa). Knowing this would help me understand what sort of ideological baggage these guys brought to their duties, whether they were trying to apply any supposed "lessons" from one part of the empire to another part, and, more broadly, how the different parts of the empire interacted with one another. The idea is to see the British Empire - and, by extension, imperialism generally - not as a top-down system in which the center imposes its will upon the periphery, but rather as a decentralized, improvised, and slightly unstable system with a whole bunch of (occasionally interlocking, occasionally colliding) moving parts. Sort of like a sixth-grade band recital.

This need to understand the lives of Britain's imperial administrators has brought me into close communion with one of the great towering achievements (alongside Jaffa Cakes and Monty Python's Life of Brian) of British civilization: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Haven't read the ODNB yet? Don't feel bad: it contains biographical sketches of over 56,000 figures from British history (or, as they put it, "Remarkable people in any walk of life who were connected with the British Isles"), from the ancient Romans all the way up to people who died in 2005.* You can access it online, but you have to have a subscription, or the library you're using has to have a subscription, which almost all UK public libraries and most good American university libraries will. You can also buy it as a 60-volume set for $6,500 (Amazon also has a used set for a mere $2099.97), but honestly, who has the space? There's also a free podcast (one life every two weeks), an RSS feed, a life-a-day email, and a few freebies on the website as well, all of which you should probably try out before you commit to buying the whole thing.

I love the ODNB for many reasons, perhaps the most important (and least interesting) of which is that it's a wonderful, quick reference for me as I do my research. All I have to do, when I come across an unfamiliar name, is type it into the search engine and see if there's anything on the dude (and, for what I'm doing, it's almost always a dude) I'm curious about. If there is, I've suddenly got a lot of insight that I didn't previously have into what went on at a very remote place in a very remote time. If there's not, I shrug and move on. The articles also contain lots of information about the archives in which a person's papers are held, the most significant secondary sources that discuss the person's life and career, and (somewhat perplexingly) the person's wealth at time of death.

But the real fun starts when I let myself get distracted by the contents of the articles. Usually I just skim them for salient career information, family history, attitudes toward specific political issues, etc., but I often come across a sentence like the following, from Anthony Clayton's biography of Lord Francis George Montagu Douglas Scott (1879-1952), and then I'm hooked: "From 1905 to 1910 Scott served as aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India, the earl of Minto, combining his duties with his two principal sporting interests, cricket and pig-sticking." Pig-sticking! Genius.

Or maybe something like the following, from David Matless's biography of Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942): "His marriage lacked emotional depth: Helen Younghusband led a quiet and melancholy home life (from 1921 to 1937 at Westerham, Kent), while her husband ranged around the country and the globe. In 1939 he met Madeline Lees, thirty-two years his junior and mother of seven children, with whom he conducted a passionately mystical affair until his death." How can I not go back and read the whole article after something like that?

So here's the thing about the ODNB, and the reason I love it so: it's a hybrid publication, an essentially Victorian enterprise with a modern veneer. Way back in the 1880s George Smith and Leslie Stephen, with typical Victorian grandiosity, conceived a comprehensive series of biographies of every important Briton who had ever lived. With considerable expense and massive scholarly energy, the two men - one as publisher, the other as editor - began churning out biographical sketches, in alphabetical order, every three months from 1885 to 1900. Eventually the sketches comprised 63 volumes and represented the work of over 600 contributors. The press revised the volumes for a few years and then, from 1912 to 1996, they stopped producing new editions, although additional volumes on the recently deceased appeared regularly.

In the 1990s the OUP decided to publish a new edition, bringing in modern experts to revise the musty old articles with modern historiographical techniques and perspectives, as well as adding new entries on people who may have been overlooked in the original edition (women, for example). This was also a massive and expensive undertaking, and it's still ongoing. Most of the major historical figures from the first edition have been considerably reevaluated, the new contributors bringing in the most recent scholarship and asking all the right, politically correct questions about their subjects. These are usually quite insightful and engaging, and a whole lot easier to digest than the sort of 600-page, day-by-day biographies that seem to be all the rage these days.

But I love this new ODNB primarily for the lives that have fallen through the cracks, the ones that have not been revised (or at least not very heavily), the ones where the original Victorian prose still survives in all its unselfconscious, mauve-tinted glory. Most of the men I'm looking up were pretty minor figures, and so apparently haven't merited much attention from the ODNB's modern contributors. Men like Lord Elgin, a not-especially-successful Viceroy of India from 1894-99, whose letters I came across at the British Library in January and who, it seems, conducted a fairly tense correspondence with Queen Victoria on the topic of the government's relations with Muslims. Or Sir Antony MacDonnell, an Irish Catholic who served as a provincial governor in India in the 1890s before returning to Ireland to serve as Undersecretary at Dublin Castle from 1901-8. These were reasonably important men in their time but almost wholly forgotten these days, and, while the ODNB gives me a good outline of their lives, it also gives me a glimpse into how these people were regarded by their contemporaries, for it is by them that the articles about them were originally written, and many of these assessments have been left intact by the modern contributors. Much of what they say fleshes out the personalities of these men, their priorities and their culture, much better than a bare-bones encyclopedia entry could ever do.

So, for instance, we have Sir William Duke (1863-1924), an administrator in Bengal, as described by P. G. Robb: “Duke thoroughly enjoyed Indian life, especially in its outdoor aspects, was a fair shot, and acquired a good field knowledge of the fauna and flora of Bengal. An indefatigable walker, he liked to explore his districts and to get to know the villagers, by whom he was called ‘the sahib who does all his daks (journeys) on foot’.”

Then there's George Robert Canning (Lord) Harris (1851-1932), Governor of Bombay from 1890-5, described by Katherine Prior as an avid cricketer who "always regarded his official work as a distraction from cricket, albeit a necessary one..." Prior goes on to say, "after outbreaks of sectarian rioting in 1893 and 1894, Harris saw himself as an umpire in India, deploying the rules of fair play to balance the competing interests of Hindus, Muslims, and Parsis." Communal riot as cricket match, with the state as umpire? That's absolutely brilliant, is what that is, and it gives me insight into the whole phenomenon that I hadn't ever considered - a way of looking at the person and period that I, from my 21st-century, non-cricket-playing perch, would never have imagined. Plus it's also kind of amusing, and also maybe a little bit depressing.

I could give you similar examples all day, but I'll restrain myself.

The wonderful thing about ODNB, then, is not only that it's amusing (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), but also that - in many instances - it illuminates its subjects from two very different vantage points. It gives you the modern, sophisticated, well-researched version of a person's life, the sort of thing that is both fairly objective but also somewhat distant, far-removed from the era in which he (or, occasionally, she) lived, and therefore a perspective that's slightly out of sympathy with these people. But it also gives you - in the lives of the relatively minor figures - traces of an older way of doing history, a more subjective point of view that, in the case of the Victorian imperial administrators who were actually alive during the ODNB's first publication run, is much closer to the lives it describes. At its best, it can give you the impression of sitting around a fireplace listening to people tell stories about someone they knew, rather than sitting in a lecture hall while some slick young professor reads you her latest peer-reviewed journal article.

As for me, I'm now considering a chapter on pig-sticking.

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*One of the principles for inclusion in the ODNB is that you have to be dead - so, for instance, John Lennon and George Harrison have entries but Paul and Ringo do not.

The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Diner Roundup

Good golly but I'm getting tired of diners. I've told you before about how I once romanticized diners as remnants of a vanishing America only to slowly realize that, whatever their charms, their food is usually pretty bad. Well, over the past couple of weeks, as I've visited a few more diners in the Valley, I've come to a further realization: although they may seem quirky and authentic compared to the soul-sucking sameness of the national franchises, diners can be quite boring and predictable when compared to each other.

Imagine a world without fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Are you imagining it? No? Maybe this will help: imagine a world before fast-food restaurants and casual dining chains. Okay? What year is it? Like, 1948 or something, right? Now imagine you're driving across the country, or maybe it's your lunch hour at your construction job and you want a cheap, quick meal. Where are you gonna go? What's that? Yup - you're gonna go to a diner. But which diner? That's right - the closest one. And do you know why you're gonna go to the closest one? Because it doesn't friggin matter which diner you go to! They're all the same: same atmosphere (a counter with some stools, a lot of chrome, maybe a larger dining room off to the side), same food (competently produced breakfast items, greasy burgers, some baked goods, watery coffee), same service (surly waitresses who look like they were born there), same customers. Okay, maybe there'll be a bit of variation - a daily special here, an exceptionally good peanut butter pie there - but it's 1948, how much uniformity do you expect?

My point? Diners aren't antidotes to the crushing conformity of the contemporary American dining scene, they're the cause of it. They are the grandparents of all the McDonaldses and Applebeeses and Joe's Crabshackses that are currently ruining our landscape, poisoning our groundwater, and perverting our children. They were the ones who first gave us a taste for the cheap, filling meal and the no-frills, no-surprises menu. They taught us - or they taught our grandparents, who then taught our parents, who then taught us - to treat food like a car treats gasoline, as something that's necessary to keep the engine from knocking and the wheels turning, but not something to be enjoyed. "Food is fuel," says the roadside diner, "perch on a stool, fill 'er up, and head off to where it was you were going." This, of course, is a lie, but we believed it - or our grandparents did - and now look what we're stuck with.

That said, a lie told by a crusty old-timer is always more interesting than a lie told by a youthful, corporate fast-talker, so diners remain superior to their progeny. But they're liars all the same, and we would all do well to bear that in mind.

I'm going to run quickly through the three diners I've hit over the past few weeks in the search for The Perfect French Toast. I was never expecting to find TPFT in these places, and I wasn't really expecting any of these meals to be that memorable - turns out, I was right about the french toast, but only partly right about the memorable bit. This, as you will see, is not a good thing. In what follows I'll be focusing on the differences between these diners, but these are pretty minor variations within the overall uniformity of the diner experience.

Here they are, in ascending order of disgustingness:

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The Route 9 Diner


I always forget about this place, probably because it blends in so well with the parking-lot sea that surrounds it. It's a new building masquerading as an old one, but not very convincingly, and all the exterior chrome (or chrome-like plastic) isn't exactly inviting, nor, to my eye, is the stars-and-stripes motif that dominates the place. When I popped in this morning the place was empty except for several groups of hungover college students boasting about last night's kegger. The waitresses were abrupt and sullen, there was neon track lighting running around the dining room (where I was seated, though not by choice), lots of air conditioning, a rotating pie case, and individual jukeboxes at some of the tables.

I was surprised, however, to see a variety of french-toast options. Theirs is a challah french toast, a phenomenon to which I'm becoming quite accustomed, and it was offered with all sorts of bells and whistles, if I wanted them: walnuts, bananas, strawberries, etc. I refrained, of course, and ordered it straight, no chaser. I noted that my waitress, who hardly looked at me, didn't offer me real maple syrup, as another waitress did at a table nearby, and when my plate arrived I was depressed to find two plastic containers of restaurant-supply maple-flavored corn syrup, alongside plastic containers of butter. The bread itself was crisp on the outside and not too mushy on the inside, a passable effort at gourmet french toast in a decidedly non-gourmet establishment, and I left feeling well-fed but considerably beaten down by the neon shininess, the serving-staff sullenness, and the fratboy gossipiness. I won't be back.



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The Bluebonnet Diner


The first time I tried to eat here, way back in the fall, it was Sunday and they were closed. The second time I tried, it was also Sunday and they were closed. Beginning to detect a pattern, but utterly failing to understand why a diner would close on Sundays, I tried again during a weekday, and they were open. Whatever I had at the time was fine, but completely uninteresting.

The Bluebonnet is certainly a much more attractive place than the Route 9. It's an old-style dining-car diner, and on the outside it advertises "Broasted Chicken" - which is a way of preparing chicken about which I must confess complete ignorance. Instead of looking into the matter further, however, I've simply been pretending that the sign says "Breasted Chicken" and having myself a good, juvenile chuckle whenever I drive past.

Inside, the place looks like any old diner, although it is worth noting that the dining room off to the side does sport a miniature toy train that chugs along below the ceiling. The customers are mostly old, mostly overweight, and mostly in sweatshirts. The waitresses are surly but not sullen, which suits me fine. They also have individual jukeboxes at the tables, a "Donut & Pastry" case on the counter full of shrinkwrapped donuts and muffins, and a clock on the wall that says "Worcester Diners." (Well, what it really says is "tick-tock, tick-tock.")




When I ordered the "thick-style" french toast listed on the menu, the waitress said, "They put some powdered sugar on the french toast, if that's okay," giving me the impression that other customers had complained about this wild culinary innovation (although looking around me, I couldn't imagine that this could be so). I told her that of course it was okay. Sure enough, when the toast came out it was dusted with powdered sugar, and it even came with real maple syrup, but the fun stopped there. The bread was cold and chewy, flavorless apart from the syrup and sugar, and much the same could be said of the side of bacon I got with it.



"Bleck," I said, and got up to pay my bill.

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Kathy's Diner


I really want to like Kathy's. According to the info on the back of the menu, a diner has been on this spot since 1923, although I'd guess the current building dates to the 1930s. It's been known by many different names - the Amos Diner, Mac's Diner, Jim's Diner, the Miss Northampton Diner, the White Castle Diner, the Red Lion Diner - and the current owner, Kathy, has been working there since she was a teenager. Kathy can still be seen behind the counter most days, presiding over the sizzling grill with the assistance of a larger, younger fellow whom I can only assume is her son or grandson. They're both friendly, know their regulars, love the Red Sox, and usually run the place all by themselves, with no additional waiting or cooking staff. It's also cheap - really cheap, like $3-for-french-toast-cheap.

Unfortunately, that's about $3 too many.

Part of the problem is that, while charming from the outside, Kathy's is kind of disgusting on the inside. The counter and tables are frequently crummy and greasy, several windows are broken and taped over with plastic, and the whole space behind the counter really needs a good dusting. But most of the problem has to do with the food, which is - not to put too fine a point on it - gross. Really gross. Almost inedibly gross. Almost vomiting-on-my-shoes gross.

Really, really gross.

The french toast I got, which was served alongside a plastic bottle of Vermont Maid corn syrup (no effort being made to hide its humble origins), appeared to have been made from a standard loaf of white Wonder Bread. It was thin as a communion wafer, but it still managed to do something that I've never experienced before, nor would have thought possible. The outside of the bread was crispy, like toast should be, but once I bit into it the two sides slid apart to reveal a slimy, eggy interior that had the consistency of custard. It was a bit like eating cow tongue, which is similarly rough on the outside and slimy on the inside, but at least with cow tongue you know why it's gross. And remember: thin as a communion wafer. This was, and remains, a complete mystery to me, defying all the laws of chemistry and physics of which I'm aware (which, I'll admit, don't add up to very many).

But this was nothing compared to what happened when I bit into the last slice. The other slices may have been wretched, but at least they were still recognizable as french toast. This last slice, though, had clearly gotten too much egg batter on it - I don't even want to think about how this worked - and so was almost more egg than bread, which made it a bit like eating a fried egg that had attached itself, parasite-like, onto a soggy piece of Wonder Bread. This might have been okay, or at least slightly less gag-inducing, if I'd been expecting a meal of eggs-on-toast, but I wasn't, and, what's more, it didn't taste like eggs-on-toast so much as it tasted like what might happen if someone next to you was eating eggs-on-toast and then burped in your direction. And you simultaneously had your mouth full of slimey mush.

When I started this quest, I had no idea that I was endangering my life. Now I know better, and will proceed with all due caution in the future.

Also in the future: much as I'll continue to wish her well, I do believe I will not be returning to Kathy's Diner.