Somaless Apocalyptic Prestigious Dopplegangers

I had a twisty day yesterday. I went over to Soma to read William James but the coffeehouse was full of guys on laptops talking about networking. Their voices were annoying and the hot chocolate I bought[1] wasn't very good so I left soon. The crowd at the Runcible Spoon didn't feel appealing either so I moved on and dropped by the Changeling LARP to look at costumes. With excellent timing: it turned out the game was running early and they were just wrapping up, so I got to hang out, listen, look, and talk to people. And got invited to the aftergame dinner -- I know a lot of the people, and used to be in the game, but haven't been a regular in years, so defaulted to being hesitant about just joining them. Dinner was fun, and then Kyle was gathering people to go see The Prestige, and I went with that, with a detour involving listening to Susan Napier talking about anime on the radio, meeting a bunch of cats, and borrowing swan_tower's Warrior and Witch from fallenrose. All I knew about the movie was anima's "David Bowie as Nikolai Tesla must be the best movie EVER" and I haven't even seen David Bowie. But it was a good movie. Probably bears re-watching, in the same vein as Memento and The Sixth Sense. Which thought led to my final ride home, swan_tower herself, telling me to avoid Signs and The Village, for what sounded like good reasons.

And then I didn't stop reading Warrior and Witch until I finished at 4am, with office hours to arise for at 11. My sleep schedule, it suxxors.

Hot Choc and Qdoba

(aka "oh yeah, I forgot my footnote last time". Aka Nicoll disease. (Not really, I just made that up.))

I don't have hot chocolate very often, but I've got opinions of local sources anyway. Top of the line: Barnes and Noble, at least a few years ago. They and Borders both had *two* hot chocolates in their cafes: one was "hot chocolate", and the other was branded. I think B&N had Joseph Schmidt and Borders had Godiva but I don't recall exactly... anyway, that's the sort of brand we're talking about. Of the four possibilities I only had the brand at B&N but it was extremely good. Rich and smooth, like liquid chocolate.

These days Seattle's Best Coffee seems to run the Borders cafe, and they only offer Cocoa Trio. It doesn't match my memory of Joseph Schmidt, but it was good. I had that Thursday. Yesterday I had Soma's hot chocolate, and, well, I didn't bother having even half of it before fleeing the crowd of guys talking about IP addresses. It was more like chocolatey water, though I don't want to say it was really watery. Didn't have powder floating around either... but still, it felt like I was seeing the difference between a syrup drink and a powder drink. Or maybe just in quality.

I've had hot chocolate at the Runcible Spoon though not too recently. At a guess. it's a bit better than Soma's, but not in the bookstore class.

On to real food. akashiver said she prefers the new Tex-Mex place, Qdoba, to Chipotle due to a higher meat/bean ratio. I haven't had Qdoba's burritos but I've sampled three of their tacos and they are fairly good. Nothing like my family's (nothing is) but the meat is, well, meaty and juicy, at least the chicken and steak ones are. Not sure about the ground sirloin. OTOH, their guacamole falls into what I call the Bland Green Paste category. They do put stuff in -- I like onion and tomatoes in, not just avocado puree -- but it still felt lacking. And not much guac for a huge pile of tortilla chips (many undercooked, though I guess that just means soft rather than dangerous), for $2.70.

Hmm. I guess technically I could review Chili's, since I ate there last night. I don't normally think of Big Box restaurants as worthy of my attention. I just had their skillet queso appetizer with chips, supposedly cheese and beef. The color looked like bean paste, though there were meat chunks in it; anyway, pretty unexciting. I ate most of it with salsa mixed in.

Time to update my restaurants list. Sans Chili's.