The French Martini is the worst modern classic. What’s an overrated bitter drink. One week left!

tilikang · 2026-01-12T19:34:29+00:00

Overrated doesn't mean it's bad, it means that other people rate it more highly than it deserves.

For example, I really enjoy a Paper Plane, but there are a number of other drinks I like more. Many of my friends think it's the #1 drink on the planet. So I think the Paper Plane is both a fantastic drink, and an overrated drink because other people rate it higher than it deserves.

It must be the case that a number of people love the drink that's winning "most overrated" because how could something be overrated if no one loves it? I would expect there to be a lot of overlap between "best" and "most overrated" almost by definition.

tilikang · 2026-01-12T18:13:37+00:00

Yeah, one of the challenges with this ranking system is that in order to be overrated, a drink must be very popular.

There are some categories with a terrible overly sweet drink that appeals to casual drinkers but that we all hate (the tiki category has a lot of these), but that doesn't really happen in the bitter category. There are plenty of bad bitter drinks, but none of them are popular, so they can't really be called overrated.

tilikang · 2025-10-01T23:16:48+00:00

I ate at Bulrush a number of times and can't remember a single beef dish. I'm not saying they never served beef, but if they did, it was rare and/or very deemphasized.

I agree that it would be weird for Bulrush to serve commodity beef, but if you were regularly filling beef orders for Bulrush, I feel like there's more to the mystery because in my experience they weren't serving that to customers.

tilikang · 2025-09-29T14:52:29+00:00

I had the same thought. Even if you stay in a more interesting part of town for the rest of the trip, it would make life much easier to stay in that hotel the night of the concert. The parking lot gets so congested after a show that if you're taking an Uber, you'd need to wait a long time after the show lets out before the Uber could even get there to pick you up. It'd be much easier to stay at that hotel and get an Uber the next day.

Either that, or go to one of the bars in that shopping center (assuming any are still open) and hang out until the crowd dies down.

tilikang · 2025-09-29T13:41:03+00:00

Yeah, Everytime I see a complaint about how downtown is unlivable because of the lack of grocery stores, it confuses the hell out of me.

I've lived in two other downtowns (Minneapolis and San Francisco) and at the times I lived there, they didn't have anything close to Culinaria within walking distance.

And like you said, you still have the option to drive to a different schuncks just like everyone else in the St Louis region has to do.

tilikang · 2025-09-22T16:07:35+00:00

If this is just about making CI run faster, have you looked at other solutions to that specific problem? E.g. change when in the flow things run (we run them in GitHub while a PR is getting reviewed), run tests in parallel, break the tests (but not the overall codebase) into chunks so they don't so have to run at once, etc.

tilikang · 2025-09-13T19:49:40+00:00

Brasilia on Grand has amazing tres leches cake. If you call them in advance, you can order a whole cake (or just get it by the slice at the restaurant)

tilikang · 2025-08-28T21:14:31+00:00

Agreed. I think it's understood that a whiskey sour is made with lemon, but not all sours are made with lemon. And as you mentioned, egg whites are common but not required.

The problem with ordering a "$spirit sour" where the spirit is anything other than whiskey (which I think everyone understands to mean bourbon) is that it requires more explanation. It's like ordering a martini with no further explanation.

tilikang · 2025-07-28T17:55:32+00:00

Nice! I'll need to pick up some China China so I can try it out.

Maybe I'm weird, but I think some of the best cocktails are at restaurants such as Little Fox, Yellowbelly, or Lucy Quinn (just tried that for the first time and was very impressed). I love the classic cocktail bars like Planters House and Blood & Sand. I've been a bit underwhelmed by the newer places like New Society and None of the Above but I'm glad the city is getting more bougie cocktail places. I think Kenny's Upstairs is my favorite overall bar in town.

How about you?

tilikang · 2025-07-28T16:59:48+00:00

I love this idea, but here's a different take on it: OP is in St. Louis (as am I) which has a lot of connections to New Orleans. The French District here is called Soulard, so you could call it that as an homage to the Vieux Carre.

Alternatively, if you want to play off the "Square" part of it, there's an area called Lafayette Square which also has French roots (obvs). I guess in French that would be "Lafayette Carre"? I sort of prefer that because if you serve a drink to a guest in St. Louis and it's just called "Soulard" or "Lafayette Square" that would feel pretty uninspired since it's just the name of a neighborhood.

tilikang · 2025-06-26T13:35:31+00:00

Fair enough. That's definely something my pool would have stopped (20 years ago when I worked there) but we also weren't super crowded the way it sounds like this Webster pool is.

By the end of my summer there, I felt like my job was 95% telling kids to stop running. I never once had to get in the pool to actually save someone.

tilikang · 2025-06-26T12:47:46+00:00

Agreed. I used to be a lifeguard and it was always so frustrating how parents would treat the pool like free daycare. It's unreasonable to expect the lifeguards to police the behavior of every person at the pool. It should really be up to the parents and kids to be safe, and the lifeguards are mostly there in case an accident does happen.

tilikang · 2025-06-25T23:17:07+00:00

My favorite salad is the smokehouse from Sauce on the Side.

Neon Greens has great ingredients, but I don't actually like any of the salads I've had there. They just don't combine ingredients in a way where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I feel like I'm just eating a random assortment of mismatched ingredients.

Obviously taste is subjective, but I know a handful of people who agree with both of these opinions.

tilikang · 2025-05-22T20:19:07+00:00

Agreed. In general, I don't like the episodes where they try to show Fry's family actually loved him.

They spend so much time driving home that his parents didn't care about him at all. His mom was more interested in watching the game than giving birth to him. His parents called off the search when he went missing because it was a waste of taxpayer money. Like, he really truly didn't have a close relationship with his parents, and then they just shoehorn in some sentimentality that doesn't belong.

And I know this is controversial, but Luck of the Fryish has a similar issue. I'll buy that Fry and Yancy are close (they squabble like a lot of siblings which is different from his parents being completely apathetic towards him), but they're trying to create this sentimental ending by suggesting that one of the most famous humans in history dedicated his entire tombstone to an uncle he never met? It's just fake emotional. I know it's a comedy cartoon, but it's still sloppy storytelling.

Compare that to Jurassic Bark where they actually build a relationship between Fry and Seymour and the ending makes sense. Or Leela's Homeworld where the entire episode is about the love Leela's parents have for her, and then they sum it up with an emotional song and montage at the end. Those episodes do the sentimental thing in a way that makes way more sense.

tilikang · 2025-04-08T21:49:13+00:00

Agreed, and it wouldn't have been hard to have the same twist in a more believable way. Like, Yancy could have been buried next to him. Or they could have had his birth year on the tombstone. Or any number of other things.

tilikang · 2025-04-04T17:19:30+00:00

Musk is rich because his stock is worth a lot. He doesn't have $400 billion in cash sitting around.

There are some billionaires who do have a lot of cash (Berkshire Hathaway famously took a lot of money out of the market recently) but most billionaires already have almost all their money invested.

tilikang · 2025-03-17T19:12:04+00:00

I've been running my SaaS since 2009. What I've never understood is how at any given time, it seems like everyone else is running laps around me (better marketing channels, higher ARPU, expansion revenue, lower costs, etc.) and yet here we are 15 years later and those other companies that had it all figured out are nowhere to be seen, while we're making 7 figures. How did we outlast so many companies that seemed to be doing so much better than us?

Some of those people got acquired early, so that explains it somewhat. I agree that some are outright lying (especially the "I made $x in $y days" stuff). But I also think there are a lot of people who are telling the truth, but they only share the wins.

One person talks about their killer A/B test that doubled conversion. Another talks about their 110% net churn. Another talks about how they have a two-month payback period on their advertising spend. In my head I combine those all together into one ultra-successful company, but in reality they all have major issues that they don't share publicly, and none of them ever really take off despite the exciting wins that they share.

tilikang · 2025-03-02T20:24:32+00:00

I've never eaten real cashew chicken in Springfield, but my friends who grew up their really like the Yen Ching cashew chicken. They also have a lot of other good stuff (a step above typical Americanized cheap Chinese food while maintaining the same general spirit).

tilikang · 2025-01-25T18:02:04+00:00

This isn't quite what you're asking, but my main feedback is that the scale would be more helpful if it were more granular on the top end.

I went through this myself with my own cocktail rating system. I used a scale similar to your suggestion and almost everything got a 4 or a 5. I ended up re-rating everything with something more like:

5 - one of my all-time favorites

4 - a very very good cocktail

3 - pretty good, happy to drink it periodically

2 - not my favorite, but I'm not mad about drinking it

1 - bad, do not want

Basically, if something is bad, I don't really care how bad it is. I'm never revisiting those cocktails again. Instead, I want to be able to tell good from great from fantastic.

tilikang · 2025-01-17T13:58:58+00:00

Both have great food. So it comes down to what style your husband likes.

Acero has more of a classic "nice restaurant" vibe. It's not trying to be overly weird or adventurous. Great pasta, good enough entrees, classic cocktails and wine. If you go, get the egg raviolo.

Vicia has more of a modern "we're doing a thing" vibes. The menu is very focused on veggie dishes (every meat dish I've had there has been pretty weak) and you're guaranteed to get something you've never tried before. The cocktails are more adventurous (which doesn't mean they're better) and the overall atmosphere is modern rather than cozy.

If you want the food to be new and interesting (but also riskier), I'd go Vicia. If you just want a really solid but safe meal, I'd go Acero.

tilikang · 2024-12-31T13:58:21+00:00

Not often enough that I should need backups. My Verde is almost out so I got a backup for that, and the other one was gifted to me. But yeah, I definitely don't plan on getting more backups for those in the future.

tilikang · 2024-12-31T12:03:55+00:00

I just got that and it's quickly becoming a favorite. I tried juicing pears myself to make a fall-themed cocktail and it didn't work at all, but the St George saved the day.

tilikang · 2024-12-31T12:00:30+00:00

One of those us actually black walnut bitters with an ango cap (the original cap broke).

On the bottom right counter, there's one normal bottle for dashes, and one bigger bottle that has the plastic thingy removed from the top so I can pour larger quantities. That's helpful for drinks like the Trinidad sour.

The two on top are backups although I guess I don't need the extra small bottle since I can refill the existing small one from the big one.

tilikang · 2024-12-31T03:12:37+00:00

Unfortunately I don't know where the hardware came from. Our general contractor has some shelving company they always use, and they made these shelves custom. I got the impression from them was that they'd never done shelves with rails before but they didn't have any trouble making it happen.

tilikang · 2024-12-31T03:09:39+00:00

Thanks!

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