A spectacularly bad restaurant meal

I'm back in DC for a workshop, and I'm staying at the Hilton Garden Inn near the workshop location.  Getting here was a mite weird: I got bumped from the overbooked flight to Baltimore (my preferred airport) but they got me on the flight to Dulles that actually got here sooner.  I did have the last seat on the plane (and was the last to board, after running from gate 75 to gate 68 at LAX): a middle seat in the next to the last row next to a large gentleman who coudn't get the armrest all the way down.  But no matter, my seat on the Baltimore flight wasn't much better. I can take it for 4 1/2 hours, and I've definitely had worse.

The hotel is, so far, unexceptional, but hey, it's a place to sleep, and it's basically across the street from where I need to go.

There is a restaurant in the hotel called Todd Gray's Watershed, or something like that, so I headed down to get dinner (not having eaten on the plane, and feeling a bit peckish by now.. about 5PM home zone time). The menu was sort of interesting, a lot of shellfish and seafood, sort of mid Atlantic seaboard styles. So I decided on the "Carolina Style Barbequed Shrimp with creamy white grits, andouille sausage, and green onion butter".  The Reuben sandwich also looked good, but, hey, might as well try something new, and the combination of shrimp and andouille looked interesting, if a bit more Louisiana than Carolina. It's just a name, after all.  Part of it was they didn't have beer listed on the menu anywhere, and a Reuben needs beer, really. And nobody should eat fresh fish in a restaurant on Monday; fishermen don't work on Sunday, after all. 

The wine list wasn't all that exotic, so I went for the Clos du Bois Sauvignon Blanc: safe, by the glass, a basic supermarket white bordeaux I'm sure I've had before. I figured the acidity would work with the buttery grits and sausage.

The whole thing goes downhill from there.  The waiter finally shows up. Monday night, maybe 20-30 people in the place, total, at a dozen or so tables, half a dozen waiters.  I do the ordering thing, ask for some water.

A while later (a long while), my waiter shows up with a glass of red wine (most likely a Malbec, based on the bill, about which more later).  Oops.. Dude, I ordered a white, even pointed to it on the menu, it's in the white column as opposed to the red column.  He trundles off.  Another long while later, and my glass of wine shows up. It's sort of ok, but not what I've been drinking recently (Santa Barbara county white bordeauxs for the most part). No matter, it's cold, it's wet, it's got some acidity.  But still no water.  A reminder, and he shows up to fill the glass with water.

No bread or rolls, but maybe that's just not something they do at this place.

The entree shows up a bit later.  I asked for some bread or something to go with it, and the waiter disappeared to fetch it (I guess they have bread in some form here).  It's hard to actually see it, because it turns out there's no real light near the table, but it is clearly shrimp on top of something creamy and grits-like.  Using the cellphone as a flashlight confirms this.

It tastes fairly good.  A sort of plain grilled shrimp (I was sort of half expecting a vinegar mustard sort of glaze), and some smoky bits of sausage.  The grits were good. The green vegetable material was sort of unidentifiable, but even as just color, it wasn't bad.  I thought maybe chard or some mild greens.  I'm not sure if that's the green onion butter, but it sure didn't taste like green onions.

My waiter brings a little 2 inch cubical piece of bread that looks kind of like a pretzel (salt on top, dark brown crust) on top, but is basically fluffy dinner roll underneath. No big deal, it's bread, and can be used with the sauce.  There's a small dish of clear liquid with it, which I thought might be olive oil or something, but it's pretty clear for that. It's oily, has almost no taste. I'm guessing peanut oil or corn oil or maybe (real) light olive oil, something useful for sauteing, but not really what you want to have on your bread.  I guess there's a reason they don't serve bread with the meal.

And it gets weirder.  The sausage is cold. They're little chunks: like you took your andouille and sliced it lengthwise into quarters, then chopped it to make sort of cubes.  And when I fork up a couple, and chew them, they're distinctly cool. Not refrigerator cold, but cool, and definitely not "fresh out of the saute pan" (which is how *I* would have done it.. zap them into the pan with the shrimp and get some sizzle on it).  And as I eat the shrimp I realize, they're not really hot, just warm.  Hmm, looks like they have a couple big pots of grits and greens, and a steam table tray of shrimp that have been previously cooked, and a bin of sausage bits. No wonder it didn't take too long to make this dish.. all they had to do was "spoonful of grits, smaller spoon of greens on top, sprinkle sausage chunks, stack shrimp on top, and serve".  It could have been so good (and probably was, when Chef Todd did it the first time).

And the bowl is dirty on the outside. At first I just thought it was a sort of rustic texture, but it wasn't even around the bowl, and upon closer inspection (cellphone as flashlight again), yep, food residue on the outside of the bowl. Well, hopefully it's just sloppy plating and not a derelict dish machine operator.

Meanwhile, the waiter never comes by, nobody fills the water glass, etc.  I finish and wait. And wait. And wait.  Another waiter walking by buses the dishes.  Finally my waiter reappears and he has the bill.  By this time, I'm ready to do the zero tip thing and put a long written list on the back of the bill.  Except.. there's no pen to sign the check with (or to make my ranting list).  The waiter comes up with a pen when asked.  So I start my listing on the back of the bill, and then turn it over.  Whups... the entree price is different than what's written in the menu (less, as it happens), and the kind of wine is wrong (later, on comparing with other wines by the class, the abbreviation matches Malbec), although the same $9/glass price.  So I ask for the manager.  As does the guy at the table next to me, who has ALSO had appalling service.

The guy comes over and I point out that the prices on the bill don't match the prices on the menu, but beyond that, there's some problems, which I list.  He disappears for a while, and comes back with a revised bill with no entree, but still the wrong kind of wine.   I was willing to pay for the entree.. it's not the first, nor will it be the last, where I gamble and lose, but the guy insisted.  I asked about the variety of wine (an old fraud between bartender and waitstaff, or manager and owner, is to ring up different items than actually sold, especially if the margin is better on some than others. ) Oh well.. I sign the tab for $9.90 (no tip) and resolve never to eat there again.  The conference is feeding us, I think.

So here's the list...

• No water offered, but water glasses on table. Had to ask, and it took forever. Glass never refilled, until after bill brought.
• Wrong wine brought, and exorbitantly priced: $9/glass for a $12/bottle supermarket wine? $4-5 seems more reasonable, but hey, it was marked at $9, and I was willing to buy it.  I still think it tasted kind of pallid and thin, but I'd have to go buy a bottle and compare to be sure.  Maybe that's the Clos du Bois style, but it tasted like some of those almost tasteless $4-5/bottle whites we bought at Cost Plus. Sure didn't match some tasting notes I found online which talk about zesty citrus and crisp acidity.  Maybe they brought the wrong white.
• Sausage chunks cool, but not cold, nor hot. I'd be interested if the inspector or chef ever shoved a thermometer in the sausage chunk bin.  I'm betting around 50 degrees. It's a partially cured sausage, so the nitrites will kill the bacteria.
• Shrimp warm, but not hot.  140F (the usual holding temperature) is pretty toasty warm.  If you touch it, it feels hot.  I eat quite a lot  medium rare meat which is around 130-135 internal temp, and this shrimp was around that temp (by my calibrated tongue<grin>), and certainly no warmer.  It's pretty clear that this shrimp didn't just come off the BBQ grill or saute pan when plated.
• Unclean bowl.
• Bill incorrect in amounts and itemization.
• Remarkably inattentive service, for a $20-25/entree (without salad, etc.) price class place, especially when it was only 1/3 full.

We'll see how it goes.  Rarely do I eat at a place in the US where I actually worry about temperature control on the food, but there's just so many other little evidences of inattention that I just wonder. Is this a place where the eponymous Todd built the menu and then left others to run the place and they've sort of drifted into bad habits? Maybe it's because it's Monday night.

Take home summary:  The food concepts are good, the taste is good, the execution and (especially) the service is the pits.

Judging the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF)

A non food post, for a change.

I just returned from spending several days in Pittsburgh, PA (a nice place, green and hilly) judging the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, known as ISEF.  This is the big deal in the high school science fair world with about 1000 projects from all over the world. By this time, the projects have competed at a school or city fair, and then a regional or state fair, to be selected to compete at ISEF, so the standard of performance is pretty high:  As the director of judging said at the judge's orientation, they are comparable to a decent journal article or master's thesis.

In this post, I'm talking about what they call the "grand awards", the first, second, etc. place ribbons (and cash), as opposed to what are called "special awards".  About 25% of the projects will receive a "place" (first, second, third, fourth), with a few firsts, more seconds, and the rest thirds and fourths. There's also a "best in category": the first of first.  The special awards are judged and presented by various sponsoring organizations (like the US AirForce, or IEEE, or King Faisal) and they use their own criteria and methods to pick winners.

There were some 800-900 grand award judges for the 1000 projects, which are divided up into a couple dozen categories of various sizes.  My category was Engineering-Mechanical and Electrical, and was the largest, with about 120 projects.  We had about 70-80 judges for the category. So how do we go about picking the winners?  It's done in two steps, really.  First, judges interview the finalists in front of their project display and submit scores (0-100).  Then, all the scores are tabulated and all the judges meet in one room to caucus to pick the winners.  What's interesting to most people is that the scores do NOT directly determine the winners, they're more to help the judges decide which ones to talk about and discuss.

Each judge only interviews a small fraction of the projects (less than 10%) on the one day of judging.  We have 17 "appointment slots" that are 15 minutes long, and we're assigned a specific project in each slot (or we have an empty slot).  This year I judged 10 projects, and last year a few more.  The idea is that each project gets judged by at least 6-7 judges, and hopefully a few more, and that there's a sort of random spread of judges around the projects.  I'm an electronics kind of guy, so I got all projects that had electronics involved in some way, but I only got one of the several projects dealing with antennas.

The night before

The night before judging day, we get our slot assignments, and we go out to the exhibit floor to see the project displays.  Most of us have spent the afternoon looking at ALL the projects (without the finalists present), and that evening, you look especially at your assigned dozen, so that you can kind of calibrate yourself on what else is happening. There's some casual conversation among the judges about the projects, and this is where you can find out if there's something special you should be asking about the next day. I read the abstracts, look at the board, and make some notes about what I want to ask.  There's a form on the display if they worked at a research institution or were working with a scientist or specialist. In those cases, I want to see what the finalist did and whether what they did was their idea, or at the direction of someone else.  Working with a team is ok. Being third assistant bottle washer, not so ok.

 It's also a chance to get an assignment changed: maybe you know one of the finalists, and you don't want a conflict of interest.  I suspect the other reason they want us there the night before is to be able to deal with no-show judges.  It happens: planes don't arrive, other commitments take precedence, people get sick or injured.  When you have hundreds of judges, you can pretty much guarantee there will be some with a problem. I do not envy the fair's staff their job working all these issues.  We're all volunteers (we pay our own way to the fair and for lodging, etc.) and I'm impressed at the level of commitment. 

You can also do a bit of strategic googling when you get back to the hotel.  I didn't google the actual finalists (some judges do, but I didn't bother), but googling to find out the "current state of the art" in the topic areas is useful.  It's a poor finalist who isn't aware of what other people are doing in their field of inquiry: If I can google it, so can they.

One of the interesting aspects of judge training and orientation is that they warn us about a couple aspects of modern science fair finalists.  All these kids are scary smart, and it is VERY competitive.  With modern smart phones and internet access, it's entirely possible that if you ask a question about something that they don't know, they will get online and research it before the next judge comes around. The "educated BSer" problem grows by leaps and bounds.  It used to be that you could "test" the finalist by asking a few key background knowledge questions to see if they knew the field, but now, if you're interviewing in the afternoon, you'll get a different answer than a judge first thing in the morning.  This has always been a problem, and after judging a while, you know to ask questions that don't telegraph the correct answer

We were also warned that the finalists would google us.  They get their judges' names first thing in the morning, and apparently it's now standard practice among finalists to do a quick background check on their judges.  I don't know that anyone googled me, I didn't hear anything during judging that might have indicated it.

The day of judgement

We do our interviews. There's a PA that announces "now is the time when you should be interviewing the project in schedule slot N".   Periodically through the day, you fill out your scan form with you numeric score and turn them in.  We have to score on a 0-100 scale, but every judge has their own scheme for this.  Some judge easy, some judge hard.  Some spread their scores (I do.. my scores run from 20s to 90s), some don't.  A lot of judges basically score a median of 75 with 50-100 range.  They've tried various training schemes, but by now, they know that doesn't work, so they have a different tabulation scheme (which I'll describe later).

The interview process is sort of ad hoc.  For entrants that don't speak English, they have translators of varying proficiency, but overall I don't think anyone really suffers from being a non-English speaker.  Even in English, some finalists are voluble and talkative, and others are pretty quiet.  It's probably pretty overwhelming for them:  they've flown half way across the world (or from across town), they're getting grilled by a dozen people over a day in 15 minute shots.  It's kind of like getting interviewed for 10 different jobs in a day.   Both the judges and finalists worry about missing some essential piece of information that might make or break you. "Darn, I forgot to ask about X.  I hope some other judge asked about it."

When I interview, I ask my questions, which tend to be pretty specific.  Contrary to science fair lore, most judges don't start with "tell me about your project", because that starts what we call "the tape recorder". Sure, finalists all have a rehearsed capsule version (an elevator pitch, if you will).  Presumably, though, they've put that on the display, so I don't want to burn valuable interview time with it.  Learn it well though, you'll need it to explain to others (e.g. news media) about your project, but the judges are good at "stopping the tape"; we even get suggestions in training on how to do it, and we do compare notes about ways that work well.

I usually have picked out a few things from their display that I'm interested in, and I'll ask about them.  "Why did you decide to do X?" is a question that all judges use.  They want to know what you did, and that you did what you did for a reason, not just happenstance.  Everyone has some sort of "origin story" for why they did that particular project, some more interesting than others.  I don't know that the "my friend was injured in a motorcycle accident" or "my uncle suffered from X" works any better than "I was fooling around and noticed this odd thing happened".  We're all engineers and we love to solve problems, and we want finalists to be the same.  The kiss of death is "my teacher, adviser, brother's professor gave me a list of 3 projects and I chose this one".  You don't get many points for creativity for "doing homework problems".

I don't score as I interview.  I take notes (real important for the caucus later) about stuff that's good or bad or particularly interesting.  Then, at a break, I do my scoring.  I (and most judges) look at 3 or 4 projects before we do our first scoring, so we don't box ourselves in by giving the first project a 90, and it turns out to be the lamest of lame.

They provide a rubric dividing the score up into rough percentages for creativity (30%), scientific/engineering method (30%), thoroughness(15%), skill(15%), and clarity(10%).  Clarity doesn't get a lot of weight directly, but hey, if I can't understand what you did and why you did it, you're not going to get great scores in the first two heavily weighted buckets.  Some judges ignore the weights, some don't.    I basically start with about half the credit in each bucket, and run it up and down later, based on whether the finalist is better or worse than "average", where average is my take on the general level of competition at the fair (in the category!.. I'm not comparing against the "cure for all cancer" over in biochem, or the "solution for Fermat's last theorem" in Math).

There are certain things for which I will bomb the score in a bucket.  If the project is a "do the homework assignment", you don't get points for creativity.  If the project is a "fooling around in the garage with no plan" then you don't get points for method, no matter how good you are at machining. If the project is a "snow job" with lots of fancy words and no real content, well.. you can guess how well it does.

The Caucus

The caucus is the best and most powerful part of judging. We have a mini caucus a couple times during the day (before we start judging and at the lunch break), where we can write project numbers up on flip charts or a blackboard that we think are of particular interest.  That's a cue to other judges to take a look at them, or pay special attention when they interview later.  It turns out, though that the flip chart scores don't actually affect the final results very much, but they do prevent a sterling project from being overlooked, or a lame project about which you have subject matter expertise from getting more credit than it should.

The caucus starts after all the interviews are done around 5:30PM.  The fair takes all the individual scores for a judge and rank orders them and turns them into quintile scores (i.e. high, high med, med, low med, low), which has the effect of equalizing the "spreads" and easy/hard judges.  Then they sum the ranks on some basis, and produce a preliminary ranking of all the projects in the category.  A project with all high quntile winds up on top, all low quintiles winds up on the bottom.

Our first task as a panel is to decide "who is in the ribbons" and who isn't.  If you're not in the ribbons, it's not worth arguing about whether you are 50th place or 51st.   There's a definite time factor.  We have to have our placings nailed down, so the fair management can start the "best in show" judging (they work through the nite after we're done... we finish about 9PM, typically).  The fair incentivizes us to finish by providing free food and (alcoholic) drinks starting around 7:30 PM.  Spend too long in caucus, and all there is crumbs, empty beer bottles, and vacuum cleaners when you get down to the reception.

The first thing we do is look for outstanding projects that, for some reason, wound up in the bottom of the pile, and for lame projects that, for some reason, wound up in the top of the pile.  These are generically known as "polarizing projects"... they'll get a few top quintile and a few bottom quintile rankings, and not much in the middle.  If you are the lone judge who tanked a project which everyone else rated highly, you have to stand up and explain what you saw.  Sometimes, it's subject matter expertise.  Sometimes, it's a question you asked, that the others didn't.  And it works both ways.  In our category, there were maybe half a dozen projects (out of over 100) that either moved way up or way down.

Then it's a matter of negotiating the placings of the remaining projects.  In our category (each caucus runs it their own way), you basically had to identify someone to "swap" with if you wanted to move a project up or down. For each proposed move, judges who ranked the project high or low stand up and give their pitch for why they thought it was good or bad, relative to the other projects.  Hopefully, there's a judge or two have actually judged BOTH of the projects being evaluated.  Interestingly, statistical analysis shows that there's not much value in a single judge having seen both, as compared to none having seen it.

This process changed how I took notes compared to last year, though.  If you have a project that is especially good or bad, you want to be able to stand up and articulate clearly, WHY you believe it should move up or down.  If a finalist is one of those projects with mostly good and one bad, or mostly bad but one good ranking, and your judge isn't willing to stand up and talk (the judging isn't blind, you can click on the score and find out who gave it), then their score gets discounted in the discussion.

As the evening wears on, some judges leave.  They have planes to catch, or other things to do. So we make an effort to pick the top winners first, and the real negotiating comes in at the end: do you get third, fourth, or nothing. There's a fair amount of swapping across the bottom boundary, and practically speaking, it depends on the extemporaneous speaking skills of the judges involved, if they are present.

Finally, you have all the placings decided. You take a vote, call it done, and head off to the reception.

Then, at the reception, you talk to the other judges and rehash some of the decisions.  I think that the whole caucus and post caucus discussion process is incredibly valuable.  A lot of the judges are multiyear judges, and I think this is how we get to a consensus about what is good or bad, in the general sense.