Wired Minds

Adam Powell

Ocean Grill Underperforms

Service and menu tank

Ocean Grill
117 Martin Luther King Boulevard
Madison, WI 53705
11:30 am-2 pm Monday-Friday, 5-9 pm Monday-Thursday, 5-10 pm Friday-Saturday
608.255.2587
www.foodfightinc.com/oceangrill.htm
$$$$$

There's a certain art to pricing menus. It's an act of balance: price too low and your profit margins are too thin, price too high and your margin for error is too thin. In the case of Ocean Grill, the prominent Food Fight restaurant overcharges, and by so doing evaporates customer patience for many missteps in planning and execution by the servers and the kitchen.

The concept seems to be California Cuisine, or possibly Mediterranean seafood in a business-hip mode, which turns out to be not very hip. Electronic music from a decade ago pulses quietly into a room done up with metal and wood and accented by sea foam and charcoal tones. A digital aquarium--no real fish here--is exemplary of the both sterile aesthetic and the muddled thinking of the proprietors. A patio is open in the summer, affording a nice view of the capitol building.

The drink lists are not particularly cogent, an indicator of more conceptual confusion. Infused vodka cocktails jostle with tropical rum-based frou-frou drinks and a very nice Champagne menu. The wine list is heavily drawn from Napa and Sonoma vineyards but there are nods to Italy, France, Argentina, and Australia. Some standouts: the 2005 Trinchero, Mary's Vineyard in Napa, packs a heady nose of melon and hibiscus and a crisp, complex mineral finish. The 2005 Riff Pinot Grigio, delle Venezie ($4/8/32) has a refined nose, a citrus, dry taste and is perfect with oysters.

The oysters on the half-shell were by far the best moments of several meals. You can choose from East or West coast on a given night. The Dababs from Washington State were vivacious, bursting with subtle undertones of brine and served with a mignonette of fruit juices, rice wine vinegar, and horseradish. Beware: the cocktail sauce was an indifferent ruination of a perfectly good oyster. Fresh shaved horseradish with a squeeze of fresh lemon proved to the best accompaniment.

The six Nueske's Bacon-Wrapped Day Boat Scallops ($12), served with thin slices of Granny Smith apples and an edible orchid were an utterly bland disappointment until we realized that by swabbing them in the sweet apple cider gastrique we could actually improve the fish taste. The texture combination would have greatly benefited from a touch more crispness to the bacon (but the strips are easier to wrap around the scallops undercooked). The visual presentation of this dish is quite beautiful, but is anyone in the kitchen tasting the food they are sending out?

The flesh of the Flash-Fried Calamari ($10) is excellent but is served with two poorly chosen sauces: chipotle-plum and spicy peanut.

The Confit of Tomato Bruschetta ($8) is lifeless and unremarkable.

A Caesar Salad, priced differently in conjunction with various entrees, hovers around $8 and was too heavily dressed, soaked in an anchovy Caesar helped marginally by squeezing the accompanying sliced lemons.

The Seafood Enchiladas ($10) are more creative, wrapping delicious blue crab, rock shrimp, cream cheese, and a piquant salsa verde in warm corn tortillas.

The entrees are generally fish or steak. You may order a selection of fresh fishes with the sauce of your choice for $19; the Pacific Sea Bass is a good bet. You may order a variety of Angus Beef Tenderloins or New York Strip, all served with either a mushroom or peppercorn sauce with a variable vegetable side; the steaks are decent and well matched by the robust tannins of the 2003 Napa Valley Folie a Deux Cabernet Sauvignon ($7/14/55).

You may also order a variety of specialty fish dishes. The Sesame Crusted Ahi ($26) is prepared correctly and is a delight, but this is really more about the chefs executing a classic recipe--batter the sashimi steaks with egg whites, roll them in black and white sesame seeds and pan-sear hard, slice and serve--than innovative cooking, though the cilantro-soy reduction is a thoughtful touch.

The Swordfish ($26), a fish many rightly feel trepidation in ordering, is styled Vera Cruz and is quite good. The blackened exterior sheaths a tender and flavorful interior, and the tomato reduction atop is an excellent compliment to the spicy red beans.

The Grilled Prawns ($27) are a wonderment of confused design. Hoison barbecue-chipotle sauce at the base felt thick and cloying, a mound of couscous at the center wasn't expected or tasty, the prawns themselves were prime specimens deprecated by a heavy pomegranate treatment, and the incongruous abundance of sauteed squash juliennes added nothing to the dish. Also, it's a Larry David/Borscht Belt one-liner scenario, where the dish is terrible--and there aren't enough prawns.

The service is knowledgeable and polite but inclined to boneheaded maneuvers like taking flatware without replacing it (it's harder to eat when you have to share a knife) and forgetting to bring bread, then taking away the bread plates in the hope that you won't notice you never got bread or butter while the tables next to you enjoy both. Charging for items that weren't ordered doesn't help, either.

When you have $28 dishes on your menu in Madison, the entire experience had better be pretty special on some level. And you need to serve bread and provide utensils. Lunch at Ocean Grill is a better option than dinner as the pain of the bill is somewhat mitigated, but a restaurant that can't stand on its dinner menu isn't playing for keeps.

Fresh Foodie Rating: 2 of 5.

Credit cards are accepted.

via http://www.madison.com/post/blogs/freshfoods/

Paul Boutin

2007 schedule                                                                 

Most of my writing won't be here, but elsewhere.

• Valleywag: Almost every day
• Slate: About twice per month
• Wall Street Journal / Wired / etc: Whatever works out

Yes, I really do have a full-time job at a tech startup, Splunk.  Almost two years now!

John Battelle

Microsoft Gets the Once Over

In this SJMN piece. Is it just me, or is the line "don't underestimate Microsoft" starting to ring a bit hollow these days?

From the piece:

According to comScore Media Metrix, the total unique audience that visited Microsoft's U.S. Web sites in December 2006 was roughly 117 million, unchanged from the previous year. Google is fast catching up, with its number of unique visitors up 21 percent to 113 million.

Microsoft's page views, an approximation of how long visitors spend at its sites, was down 12 percent in December to 18 billion, according to the research firm. Google's page views were up 90 percent to 13 billion.

Microsoft has steadily lost ground in search, despite developing its own search engine in 2004. As of November, Microsoft's share of Internet searches has fallen to 8 percent. Two years ago, when MSN search was released in beta, Microsoft share's of U.S. searches stood at 14 percent, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Microsoft's Internet slide is reflected in its online sales. During the quarter ended Sept. 30, sales for the online business unit were $539 million, down 5 percent in a year. Google, in cruel comparison, reported revenue of $2.69 billion, an increase of 70 percent.

via http://battellemedia.com/

Josh Atlas

Kai has me learning his home grown slap technique that he says is derived from Marcus Miller, Larry Graham, Bootsy and Victor Wooten. It involves first knowing where the major and minor pentatonic scales are in all 12 keys all over the neck. THEN we can move to actual slap technique. Ascending it is PLUCK, thumb, hammer, pluck. For the pentatonic in E, the notes are (there are 9 of them) E>F#>G#>B>C#>E>F#>G#>B. So that's, root, second, third, fifth, sixth, octave, ninth, tenth (third), twelfth (fifth). It is the same notes going down, but a different series of right hand movements. I think its, Pluck, Pull Off, Hammer, Thumb, then repeat the Pull Off, Hammer, Thumb. Not sure about this one, I will have to check my notes. Just a little bit of this technique will go a long way to big funkyness. It's exciting to be learning something new again, something that I never really got into in the past. So many folks slap and pick on bass that I never really thought it would be necessary to learn it but the opposite has been true. It has little to do with shredding and technique, rather it's a vehicle for developing the musical voice on the instrument of choice. Just like knowing more words (and how to use them) an musician or artist can express more of what they are feeling. More brushes, more choices. Ah, but therein lies the difficult part, when and where to use the musical brushes. The more they are used the less they are needed.

via http://5ivestrings.blogspot.com/

Thomas Claburn

Digg vs. Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Last week, I conducted an experiment to see whether Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to manipulate Digg. I posted a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) on Mechanical Turk called "Digg Manipulation Test." It read, "I've posted a story on Digg and I am looking to see whether Mechanic Turk can be used to influence story popularity. As a journalist, I intend to report the results." So that's what this post is about.

It turns out Digg is more resistant to manipulation than I had expected. It's by no means immune, but it can handle a slapdash effort like mine. I remain convinced it is vulnerable to manipulation if done by someone who knows what he or she is doing.

The results: The link I submitted to Digg got about 25 "diggs" from Mechanical Turk users in the course of a day and the HIT got removed. Needless to say, the story was not front page news on Digg.

Back in January, someone else conducted a similar experiment. The difference between the two gambits seems to be the pay rate: I was offering $0.09 per Digg, compared to $0.01 for the earlier HIT. That's largely academic now as I've been unable to pay the 25 or so people who took the assignment, owing to Amazon's removal of the HIT. Whether they deserve their $0.09 for joining me in violating the Digg Terms of Service I'll leave the the ethically pure who pass judgment on such things. Certainly, I'd liked to have fulfilled my part of the bargain.

Despite the apparent resilience of Digg, one question that arose in the course of this experiment remains unresolved: What constitutes "artificially inflating or altering" the Digg count?

Manipulating Digg is clearly against the Digg Terms of Service: "[Y]ou agree not to use the Services with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the 'digg count', blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg's services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg's services."

But what does "artificial" mean in this context? Use of the term "artificial" implies there are "natural" uses of Digg as well. The underlying premise seems to be that "artificial" means "motivated by self-interest" and "natural" means "motivated by altruism."

In other words, you can't profit from Digg (by gaming the system to drive traffic), only we can (Digg gets ad dollars for your labor and power as an aggregator). Granted, this is a bargain many businesses impose on their users, but it's a model fraught with contradictions.

What motives qualify as pure? I would argue none since motives can't be verified.

Really, the idea that voting can be separated from interests isn't realistic. Our political system is nothing but organized efforts by interest groups to artificially alter the results of a vote. The notion that voting on Digg can somehow rise above self-interest is at best naive and at worst deceptive.

via http://www.lot49.com/