from today's NYTimes foodie section

[George Thompson]

[referring to a new high-tone restaurant in the Gramercy Park Hotel:]
Once a high-bohemian enclave, the Gramercy had some tough dances in the 1990s.  January 20, 2010, Section D, p. 6, col. 3, headline this Little Piggy Finds a Home.
[evidently = "had fallen on hard times", but I don't really understand why.  What makes a dance tough, in a way that correlates with a hotel where "sad old men sit at the bar in the lobby . . . with smoke curling up toward the ceiling on exhalations of gin breath and despair"?  D6, col.6, slightly modified.  Sounds like my kind of a joint, in a way, actually.]

[from an article on the use of surgeon's tweezers in high-tone cooking; a chef speaking about the problem of achieving a desired effect when using the fingers:]
It's more difficult to make it seem it's plated as it falls.  That's what we call it, "as it falls"  It's not rustic.  It's naturalistic.  It sounds stupid, but you're using tweezers to make it seem natural.  January 20, 2010, Section D, p. 7, col. 4, headline When Fingers Would Fumble, Chefs Turn to Tweezers.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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