The Spaghetti Warehouse location in downtown Austin is closing.
That’s kind of a shame, but I think I last ate there maybe two years ago. When I was a kid, going to the Houston location was a rare and special treat. When I moved up here, it was nice to have a reasonably close location to eat at; I had some nice dinners there.
But some years back, the parking situation got out of hand. They didn’t provide any free parking near the restaurant, and it was hard to find parking on the street. Then a few years after that, they changed the menu and got rid of two of my favorite dishes (the mushrooms in garlic butter and the cheese sauce; if any of my readers happen to have a close clone of the cheese sauce, I’d be delighted to get an email). I don’t know what the one in Houston is like these days; I’ll miss the funky decor of the Austin one, but I won’t miss the food.
By way of Jimbo: VegNews has been caught using stock photos of dishes. Worse yet (the horror! the horror!) some of those dishes…contain meat. Here’s a link to a NYT blog entry reporting the scandal. And here’s a link to the mentioned blog post.
I’m actually kind of torn by this. On the one hand, I think if you’re publishing a magazine, you owe a duty of honesty to your readers. Using stock photos to represent things that they are clearly not breaks that duty, from my point of view. I don’t buy the “…it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at this time” argument. How much do stock photos cost, as opposed to having someone with a digital SLR shoot photos of actual dishes for you? Clearly, VegNews knows how to use PhotoShop if they need to do “enhancements” to photos shot in house. After all, they removed the bones from the stock photo that was supposed to represent a rack of vegan “ribs”.
On the other hand…that blog post is like every bad vegan cliche rolled into one. “…eggs from those poor battery hens that are dead basically from the moment they are born”, “…infused with antibiotics, pain and anguish”, “…pork sausage, oozing in pig fat, fresh from the slaughterhouse”. That blogger is so strident, I find it hard to decide who to root for in this instance.
Oh, wait, no, I don’t find it hard to decide who to root for after all: I’m rooting for this guy.