New York vs. London

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Slothrop said:
Side question - would I rather live in London or Bristol?
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Bristol's a great town, bit rought around the edges in places, but great pubs, loads of nightlife, cracking music scene. Don't know what prices are like either to rent or buy, although it goes without saying it's cheaper than London. Both have their plus points, I'd say London if you want to live in one of the few truly 'global' cities in the world, Bristol if you don't want to pay an arm and a leg to live in a shoebox and fancy being a short drive or trainride from some really nice countryside.
 
MATT MAson

MATT MAson

BROADSIDE
Bristol is a great place to live. Not quite as much going on as London, but that's one of the things that's great about it.
 
S

shudder

Well-known member
zhao said:
nothing as oppressive as this ever happened in London, has it?
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Serious? Not that I've spent much time there, but from the grime thread it seems as though grime raves are almost impossible to pull off in London b/c of police.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
dominic said:
istuck out in bushwick/bed-stuy at the moment. can be rather depressing (such disadvantage partially alleviated by weird performers at bar fifty steps away; all in all, would rather live in chinatown). but methinks that modern life in general is depressing. only solution is to work something out for me own self. sometimes consider moving down to savannah, georgia or some such place. or maybe way way upstate to the st lawrence river
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bushwick represent. ahh, the dog shit, the dirty needles, and rats the size of poodles!

i kind of love it here, but bed-stuy has resisted genetrification so well that even me or my most lowlife excuses for friends don't feel safe living there yet. you can't even get pizza delivered in bed-stuy. i'm dead serious. also don't confuse jefferson ave for jefferson st. one of my gay boyfriends got kicked out of a cab on jefferson avenue in full leather-panted glory after trying to get to my place on jefferson st near Ridgewood. bad, bad, bad things happened, don't ask.

maybe we could take all the non-tippers out to jefferson ave and just push them out of hte cab and see if they'd learn to give a waitress a measly $4 next time...
 
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nomadologist

Guest
dominic said:
ummm, which bar is this?!????
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my friend who works at Balthazar brings home that much, but at the same time, when you're making that much you can get in trouble with the IRS for not claiming it. i also know of this career waiter with bench warrant out for his arrest for $40,000 in evaded taxes in three years
 
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nomadologist

Guest
Canada J Soup said:
Pretty much any busy bar where there are people clamoring constantly for drinks from 10pm until 4am and only one or two bartenders working. It's not always the case, but think about how busy somewhere like Max Fish will be on a weekend night, then figure that roughly 80% of the people are leaving a dollar a drink and getting through two or three drinks an hour.
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It's not those places I worry about tipping--and it's not for the white Barnard girl waitress. It's for the 55 Mexican busboys and handymen who are working for NOTHING but tips that I leave big tips, because most places are pooled anyway. even if you hate your waitress, your tip or lack thereof affects what *every* service employee gets at a restaurant.

taxi drivers do make a killing, even with minimal tips, but they're usually family men with like kids to feed and shit who live in Jerz like Bayonne and commute 3 hours a day
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
neapolitans are the originators -- thin crust, black olives, anchovies and what not

chicago is "deep dish"

st louis is "thin crust with provel"

new york is whatever
 
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nomadologist

Guest
old school mob-front pizzerias in new york are all pretentious about being "original" or whatever, but pizza isn't even that popular in italy, and "new york pizza" is almost as bastardized as chicago-style is compared to real italian pizza. new york style pizza is much much doughier than real italian pizza, there's way too much cheese, and the tomatoes are not fresh off a vine growing in volcanic soil

can you get good pizza in london? do they have the $2 slice? if not, how do people survive? i lived in abject poverty for a couple years and would have starved to death were it not for the $2 6000-calorie slice + can of pepsi. that and Crown's chicken sticks meal with cheese fries
 
STN

STN

sou'wester
Yeah, Nomad, there is some good pizza in London (Il Bacio in Stoke Newington/Finsbury Park/that place on Warren Street/anything else anyone cares to add to my non-exhaustive list) but there's a lot of rubbish and the £2 slice is pretty much non-existent outside of Tasty Corner, Camden (where it very much falls outside the remit of 'good pizza'). We just eat kebabs, cheap curry, samosas, chips in pitta and grubby fried chicken when times are hard. Or we live on beer and 10p Space Raiders, as I did between 1997 and 2002.
 
C

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
nomadologist said:
It's not those places I worry about tipping--and it's not for the white Barnard girl waitress. It's for the 55 Mexican busboys and handymen who are working for NOTHING but tips that I leave big tips, because most places are pooled anyway. even if you hate your waitress, your tip or lack thereof affects what *every* service employee gets at a restaurant.

taxi drivers do make a killing, even with minimal tips, but they're usually family men with like kids to feed and shit who live in Jerz like Bayonne and commute 3 hours a day
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Agreed 100% on the restaurant tipping. 'Punishing' poor service with a shitty tip is punishing everyone doing the shitwork at the back of the house. A fair number of my friends here have chefing and bartending gigs, so I'm pretty conscious of where the tips I leave go. Always tip in cash where possible too. And tip on what was served if items have been comped and the bill is lower than it otherwise would have been. Somebody still had to prepare and serve the food. One of my more embarrassing restaurant experiences here was going with some music biz guy to a place a good friend chefed at. Our table must have had over $600 of food and drinks sent out with the wait staff instructed to treat us like family and the guy (oh so magnanimously insisting on charging to a corporate card) dropped $15 on a $100 bill that barely covered appetizers. I ended up sneaking back in to make up the balance.
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
Canada J Soup said:
And tip on what was served if items have been comped and the bill is lower than it otherwise would have been. Somebody still had to prepare and serve the food. One of my more embarrassing restaurant experiences here was going with some music biz guy to a place a good friend chefed at. We must have had over $600 of food and drinks sent out with the wait staff instructed to treat us like family and the guy (oh so magnanimously insisting on charging to a corporate card) dropped $15 on a $100 bill that barely covered appetizers. I ended up sneaking back in to make up the balance.
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yeah, i hate comping food for people who are "friends" of the boss, b/c they very rarely tip on it. the kicker is that the friends are usually pretty damn rich themselves, so it's like let's give free things to the rich and make the poor suffer . . . .

only exception to this is that, when at a bar, it's not stylish to tip on free drinks. rather, you should wait until the next round and then leave roughly 3x what you'd normally tip . . . .

suppose we have a bar that serves $5 beers

suppose, too, that bartender likes you and always gives you $3 beer

suppose, last, that bartender gives you a beer free of charge

you should smile and accept the free beer without tipping on that beer

however, when the next beer is served at $3, you should leave a $6 tip
 
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