A strange day in May for LA, with some odd stuff going on.

Today was just the kind of day that KFI's Bill Handel loves.   It rained,  something that never happens in LA in May.  I know because I was married 36 years ago on this day and as all of you remember it was almost a hundred degrees in the shade.

Beyond the weather learned Mr. Handel, Esq. had to deal with the misadventures of the President of the IMF and former Governator Ah'nold.  From the New York Post this morning we learn that the distinguished French Banker and almost the next President of France hired a great criminal defense lawyer whose staff has leaked that they intend to use the good old, "She asked for it"  defense strategy.  Easy to believe, the 31 year old widow from Francophone Guinea in west Africa couldn't resist the Frenchman, a somewhat tubby grey haired 62 year old white guy.  The message doesn't resonate.  Could have happened but as another tubby sixty something white guy, I have my doubts.  That sort of thing might happen to somebody like Kobe Bryant or a young champion on the Tennis Pro tour.  It doesn't happen to sixty something white guys, not in this universe anyway. Ya think a Nu Yawk panel of twelve jurors will buy it, as they say "Fagetaboutit."

The interesting fact about his not getting bail is that La Belle France doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA or many other nations.  If the distinguished gent got home, he'd stay there.  Apparently back in France the folks are bemused and unsettled  seeing one of their mandarin class leaders getting the full Law & Order  low life perp treatment, the only thing missing was "Now I seen it all" comments by  late Jerry Orbach.  He got hauled off the Air France plane, we had the traditional "perp walk" and he was booked and then sent over for the "rapist" medical examination including full nude photos to catch any scratches or other signs of struggle.  Then he was hauled unshaven and grubby in front of a very busy Judge for arraignment in a crowded scruffy court room, the very one from Law & Order.  Finally he was given a single cell in the VIP wing of Riker's Island City Jail.

Ah'nolds shtuping his cook or whatever she was right under Maria's nose is a more ordinary event. Amazingly not the LA Times or any other media outlet has let slip the identity of Ah'nold's cook or whatever.  That is a remarkable bit of tact in this day and age.  The one really odd thing about this is that the lady stayed on the family household staff until Ah'nold left the Governorship, ten years after she had his kid.  That is not at all what you would expect.

The only good news about this is that if she wanted to go back to Sacto on her own Maria could run to succeed Jerry Brown.  She might be the class of the Democratic field even though we know she is congenitally unable to drive without talking on her cell phone.

Like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, Jerry Brown has had something turn up in the form of three billion bucks in unexpected tax revenues.  Huzzah, he says he will not have cut quite so much or raise so many taxes.  Wait for it,  don't cheer just yet. While Jerry might want to do the right thing, the good governement bipartisan thing, I bet you his not all that faithful legislature will, far more likely than not, find a way to squander this windfall, as they always do.  They also will resist to their last breath any significant reform of the current mess not to mention do anything to fix the pensions mess.  We can count on them as always to underfund the pensions and hope somebody somewhere will eventually bail it out.

And so it has come to this.

A French poet, Paul Valery I think, wrote that great ideas began as poetry but always ended up in petty politics.  (The rhyme works in French  between poetique  and politique.)  We have seen this happern before our own eyes over the past two years.  With Obama the Democratic Party went into willful self delusion. They wanted so totally to believe and love Obama that they pushed him into an office he is and was even then clearly  unprepared to take. He has a shorter resume than Sarah Palin and everybody knew it.  He had never even been a shift boss at a hot dog stand.

Hillary Clinton got more votes, a couple million more as I recall, than Obama and she was rejected. The Party went nuts over Obama.  As Sarah Palin put it in her inimitable way when she asked, "How's that hope 'ee change 'ee stuff workin' out for you?"

Do you think the Democratic Party would be in today's titanic trouble if Hillary were President? 

The Donkey herd today would be fine if Hillary was our President and they would be acting like a governing party not a bunch of hopeless academic ideologues and left wing moon bats. What a crew Obama has in office, most of them are head in the clouds academics, leftist fanatics or cant spewing pedants. Under a President Hillary the Democrats might drop a normal midterm twenty to twenty five seats in this November election. She would have pushed and coaxed the House GOP into line and not tried to do something as crazy as the vast overhaul of all Health Care. She had been there and knew what a thankless hopeless mess that was. She could have gotten  a program of solid piece meal reforms through with real bipartisan support and avoided the hair pulling or  eye poking. She would not have turned the banks over to the Wall Street elite and she would not have let small and medium size business roll over and die. 

If Hillary were President today I would guess she would be holding in the low to mid 50's and not have to worry about losing either house of Congress. The Democrat would not be risking an almost total Republican control of next years reapportionment in thirty five states (That will mean at least 15 to 20 seats shifting to the GOP for sure). She might be attacked by both the right and the left but she would be solid and have strong business and labor support. She also would know just how much to give to the Rep's to keep them in line. 

This Obama disaster was not inevitable and could have been avoided if the Democrats acted like adults. What a mess,  and now the latest polls show the folks are really so over Obama that Dub'ya is running eight points higher than he is in Ohio.  It seems most people would rather take their chances with Dub’ya again than  continue down the path Obama has charted.  Who’d a thought it would come to this?

Why do we give up the dreams and challenges for the ordinary?

The single most tragic and telling item in President Obama's proposed budget and the one that may very well be of historic importance it what he has done to NASA. Perhaps it is my generation grew up with the soaring dreams of the 1950's and 1960's of a real new frontier. We believed the cosmos was the real new frontier. We heard JFK pledged to be on the Moon in a decade and it happened. The gradual step by step rocket launches and mission following mission that brought the moon landing to reality were a big part of our youth.

Now we can not afford it, we are told. (We sure seem to be able to afford every sort of dumb thing, so I doubt this.) What we don't have anymore is the vision, the drive and the dreams to pursue further advances into space, to Mars and generation by generation further and further into the cosmos.

So we will not lead and dream anymore and we will let somebody else do it. Sad. We should not be surprised if China picked this up, they already have the bit in their teeth. We also might see Japan and Brazil (perhaps with Israeli support) pick up the task. The Japanese and Israeli scientific establishment are more than capable and now that Brazil has entered the varsity level of industrial capability they could do it. Even more Brazilians have the pride and optimism to bring off a project if they can get the technical and practical cooperation of others.

If we no longer dream and strive to go beyond the narrow streets of our daily life, we become ordinary and boring. If we forget that science and engineering are also kind of poetry, that they are and be elegant and beautiful expressions of human striving and hope, we become dull and boring. What we have is a failure of nerve and a poverty of imagination and hope by our governing elites. It is critical that we strive. What if Prince Henry called off exploration when the Portuguese sailors reached the Azores in the mid Atlantic and the mouth of the Congo River in Africa? What if Queen Isabel told Christopher Columbus that she had already pawned her jewels to pay for some new bridges on the road from Valencia to Barcelona. How much poorer and small the world would be.

This smallness of spirit that troubles me deeply. The accountants have replaced the dreamers Ironically, it is our immigrants who do not share it. To dare, to seek, to explore are the spark of human greatness.

Basta!! Get out of my face.

In Friday morning’s paper there was a news story about a bill the California State Senate has passed that would vigorously discourage if not out and out forbid free parking in California. The purpose is to force people to use public transportation and not drive cars. It passed at the same time the State’s fiscal meltdown is causing major cut backs in public transportation. Great timing.

Of course it is backed the Sierra Club and almost every one the usual hyper green zealot organizations. Why do they feel compelled to get in our face every chance they get? These activists always burn with a righteous and compelling need to impose their elevated moral judgments onto every other human, especially us ignorant peasants and peons. So we do not drive Prius’s, shop at Whole Foods, wear natural fibers and try to be friends of Polar Bears, Quail, Spotted Owls, obscure rodents and reptiles. We don’t hate critters, we just don’t include them our Christmas list.

Why do these ever so earnest people feel compelled to whack us in the chops every chance they get? This is one of those wonderful examples of supposedly ecologically inspired do goodism that really is just another mean spirited attempt to make life more difficult and trying for ordinary people. It would bring even more needless inconvenience and more useless wasted time. This bit of preemptive vengeance annoys everybody as it snatches away long enjoyed rights and it feeds the egos and self-importance of bloody minded enthusiasts.

These zealous greenie meanies are as bad or worst than the most obnoxious fundamentalist preachers. They are secular counterparts of the Taliban and all the other way over the line religious fanatics. The inflicting of pain on other people is a goal deeply embedded in their ever so pure souls. They are the ardent agents of their idols, be they a pantheist Earth Mother such as Gaia or Erda, Astarte or whoever. These zealots act in the name of a ferocious easily offend and vengeful Gawd or belligerent all punishing deity or force far beyond the teachings of any and all orthodox religions or faiths.

All I can say is that I want to keep my free parking and I want you enthusiasts to stay out of my face. You can believe and espouse any nonsense you wish but keep it away from me. Have a nice day, and if it makes you feel better go right ahead and pay ten bucks to park at your neighborhood Whole Foods. Just leave us alone and tend your own garden.

All Obama, all the time?

Random takes:

Again, the White House staff is trotting the Bamster all over the place to beat the drum for his new budget and his vast and half vast plans. OVEREXPOSURE, I mean big time over exposure. President Obama comes from an academic background and it shows. He is bright and smart (perhaps not quite as smart as we hoped, but who is?).

There is one big problem with this, besides his off the tell-a-prompter gaff’s, like yesterday’s gratuitous slam of Las Vegas, which got Sin City’s Burgermeister to say, “He’s not a friend of ours.” It also earned him a pained snarl from ever loyal Harry Reid and the Bamster made the required chest beating apologia. Poor Harry Reid is literally burning on the funeral pyre of the Health Care Reform fiasco and didn’t need the Bamster to trash his home town. The GOP crew no doubt will treasure this and Obama’s other snide cracks about Las Vegas and run them all night long on Nevada TV.

President Obama’s over exposure problem is compounded by his cool professorial demeanor and slightly above the fray distance. He ain’t warm and fuzzy. He doesn’t have have JFK’s charm and disarming wit or Ronnie Reagan’s midwestern version of the same. He isn’t the warm hearted varsity football coach like Jerry Ford. Most Americans -- even those who hated their regimes -- would have liked to had a beer with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush because were flesh and blood humans, and in private are lively guys who pepper their conversation with rude rustic jokes and lots of funny stories. They both mastered the “I’m just an ole country boy” persona, even though they really were a lot more.

The Bamster unfortunately is much like Jimmy Carter, who Bill Clinton often called “The Parson” because he could never come down from the moral heights nor stiffle his need to preach. Nixon had a huge warm and fuzzy deficit, even worse the Bamster. Bush the father seemed so tied up by his patrician DNA and upbringing, he always seem awkward.

There is no way to make Barrack Obama a warm personality. He is not Harold Ford, cute enough to be a TV star, overflowing with charm and good humor, an ability to listen and as my daughter says, those flirty eyes.

So my free advice to the White House is, cool it with the Bamster on the Road National Tour. He isn’t Bill Clinton or Ronnie Reagan. I honestly think like with Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover, the public is tiring of his preaching and his odd Chicago combination of high concepts and rough house politics. They have noticed his inner stiffness as the did with Bush the father, and his stubborn streak like Bush the son’s.

One more thing, I think Michelle Obama is doing her job very well and her hubby could take some lessons. There are even times I think we put the wrong half of the First Couple in the Oval Office and she in fact would be a far more effect manager of the country’s business. She like most female leaders would do, not go into Hamlet like contemplation and on things like legislation would talk a lot with not talk to the Republicans and bring them on board when she could and knock them around when she couldn’t.

The ultimate high tech weapon.

In the current loud and overwrought rumpus about terrorists sneaking explosives onto Airliners in their skivvies we can see one of the great but usually overlooked flaws in the American character. When we face a problem we always seen to gravitate to the most envelope pushing high tech solution. We love gizno’s and the fancier and more expensive the better. Everybody is talking about new and better and far more expensive sniffing machine to spot terrorists hiding explosives on their persons. Who knows if they really work in the field, if we can train TAS schleps to read and understand the data they get from the machines.

What irritates me greatly is that we avoid the clear and obvious answer, the one any child would know and understand. We already have the world’s most sophisticated and discriminating sniffing machine. Yeah, you see where I’m going. We have the DOG. Canis Lupis Vulgarus.

Among the various breeds of dogs I am told that the Beagle is particularly good at sniffing out contraband. Additionally it is a relatively small dog, ever so cute and amiable and hardly likely to frighten women and children. With it’s big dark eyes, floppy ears and perkiness, who could object to getting sniffed by an adorable friendly Beagle? We know that in the USA and UK Beagles are used very successfully by dermatologists to identify skin cancers. The cute mutts when trained, not very hard apparently, have a 100% success rate in smelling targeted malignancies. It is child’s play -- puppy play may be more accurate -- for them.

Ah, but it too simple. There is no big bucks pot of gold at the end of the R &D drama if we mandated every airport have a kennel full of cheerful Beagles who would sniff down passengers and baggage for us. What would it cost us? Not much beyond flea collars and bags of Iam’s dog chow supplemented by whatever human food they can charm out of their handlers and the airport staff and passengers.

Would it work? Damn straight it would work like a charm. The perky mutts would sniff out potential terrorists, they could also nab drug smugglers and folks who violate our food and drug laws by smuggling in meat contraband like real Italian salami, sweet and salty Hunan ham or South African beef jerky.

The photo is from Wikkapeda's entry on the Beagle.

- xxx -

In the current loud and overwrought rumpus about terrorists sneaking explosives onto Airliners in their skivvies we can see one of the great but usually overlooked flaws in the American character. When we face a problem we always seen to gravitate to the most envelope pushing high tech solution. We love gizno’s and the fancier and more expensive the better. Everybody is talking about new and better and far more expensive sniffing machine to spot terrorists hiding explosives on their persons. Who knows if they really work in the field, if we can train TAS schleps to read and understand the data they get from the machines.

What irritates me greatly is that we avoid the clear and obvious answer, the one any child would know and understand. We already have the world’s most sophisticated and discriminating sniffing machine. Yeah, you see where I’m going. We have the DOG. Canis Lupis Vulgarus.

Among the various breeds of dogs I am told that the Beagle is particularly good at sniffing out contraband. Additionally it is a relatively small dog, ever so cute and amiable and hardly likely to frighten women and children. With it’s big dark eyes, floppy ears and perkiness, who could object to getting sniffed by an adorable friendly Beagle? We know that in the USA and UK Beagles are used very successfully by dermatologists to identify skin cancers. The cute mutts when trained, not very hard apparently, have a 100% success rate in smelling targeted malignancies. It is child’s play -- puppy play may be more accurate -- for them.

Ah, but it too simple. There is no big bucks pot of gold at the end of the R &D drama if we mandated every airport have a kennel full of cheerful Beagles who would sniff down passengers and baggage for us. What would it cost us? Not much beyond flea collars and bags of Iam’s dog chow supplemented by whatever human food they can charm out of their handlers and the airport staff and passengers.

Would it work? Damn straight it would work like a charm. The perky mutts would sniff out potential terrorists, they could also nab drug smugglers and folks who violate our food and drug laws by smuggling in meat contraband like real Italian salami, sweet and salty Hunan ham or South African beef jerky.

- xxx -

Saturday Night Live dings Obama's halo.

As the weather gets chilly, the folks at SNL did too. They opened up last Saturday night with a long monologue by the guy who does Obama. It was low key but devastating. SNL presented him as a sort of President but President Lite. Well, President Obama, didn't have a good week. Lula da Silva Samba'd right over him, Oprah, Mayor Daly, Rahm Emanuel plus the Spaniards and the Japanese. Rio was the pick for the 2016 Olympics. Rio has the biggest stadium in the world already and knows how to throw a party. Lula is real hero when he and Brazil beat the Nips, the Yankees and the Spaniards in one big show. Hurray for Brazil, as it is called in the National Anthem, Terra Amada (beloved land).

Right now Lula is the senior President in this hemisphere, not that the Chicago Crew at the White House has noticed. I bet he had a lot of bruja's working and it cost him plenty to buy enough chickens and rum to lay the bad kharma spells on the other counties.

The White House no doubted didn't even realize that after the video taping of the brutal murder of the sixteen year old high school kid by a mob at a Chicago High School, the Windy City had about as much chance of getting the Olympic site as Baghdad or Detroit. He should have seen that one coming. Amazing. Dumb, mean really dumb.

Hey, but what do I know.

Johnny Cabral

PS: It is not that I am not a patriotic American, it's just that I'm Portuguese on my Mom's side of the family and I have a DNA bias toward Brazil where their presidents have last names like da Silva, Mello, Cardoza and Vargas and they look like me.

Live in New York, every dictator & villain

Well, this has been a great week for reality Television. Turns out the United Nations in New York has been running the best and zaniest show of all. What a cast! -- Can you believe it -- First of all we have President Barack Obama reprising his favorite role, the messiah spouting pious platitudes and feel good m really good intentions just dripping with high grade kumbaya and making apology after apology for all the evils his bastard of a country has committed again and again. Spare me Dude, like a Cook County Democratic office holder really is a saint. The worse thing for me is that he apparently believes this gushing load of good intentions and feel good aspirations. At the peak of his messianic pitch Obama talked about abolishing all atomic weapons. You’ve got to wonder if Barack looked around the UN at the parade of tyrants, criminals, crooks and patently crazy “world leaders.”

What a big wishful bit of dreaming and willful blindness. Right now the tragedy of our times is not a delay in getting rid of existing atomic bombs, it is keeping every piss ant little banana republic from getting its very own nuclear arsenal. It is clear Iran and North Korea have done it already and at least a dozen other nations like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Egypt and Dubai are serious about it. This week a Brazilian cabinet member seriously suggested Brazil nuke up. So far only two nation who have had nuclear weapons have given them up: South Africa and the Ukraine. Three others have stopped their progress to nukes, Iraq and Syria because Israel bombed the hell out their facilities and Libya which threw in the towel before it’s facilities were bombed. We are facing a world where it is ever more likely that Egypt and Bolivia, Nigeria and Burma, Brazil and Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Honduras could be nuclear powers. Like Jackie Gleason used to say on his TV show fifty years ago, “You can be the first on your block to RULE THE WORLD.”

But it turns out President Obama was just the show’s up beat opening act. Follow the Bamster was a nearly two hour performance by Libya's ever popular dictator for life, Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. Peace be upon him. Now this guy was socko, I mean he was everything you could want in a dictator from from a fly blown hot dusty Islmanic third world country. He talked, then he shuffled his notes and hitched up his flowing cloak and then he talked and talked then talked some more. He tossed around booklets of the UN charter and the Security Council rule book.

Gaddafi has rambling episodic style, his performance was not classical oratory building slowly to a grand summation. Naw, Muammar rambled and wandered, he returned to the topic and segued away to something new then segued to an unexpected insult or demand. He went on and on, causing at least one of the UN’s staff translators to have a total breakdown -- normally at the UN the translators have a printed text of the speech to prep for translation ahead of time. No such luck, the guy talked and talked and not in the formal rolling cadences of cultivated classical Arabic, but in his unique Sahara dialect mixing in back county idioms and obscenities and sometimes utterly incomprehensible talk. What a show and just think beside his Earol Flynn costume picture outfit and glazed eyes, he also came to New York with his own tent. Sound track, “I am the Sheik of Araby.”

Now of course we had other mad dog horror film freaks at the United Nations high marble rostrum, leading the pack of villains was Iran’s ever popular President and election fixer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or AJ as they call him in New York tabloid headlines. While Gaddafi is an old style Arab strongman complete with flowing robes, AJ from Tehran is a modern urban rat face tool of Satan. He dresses like somebody in an almost cool ‘80’s working class dance hall kind of way. His rodent shaped face is always insincere and his eyes glow in the dark like the flaming eyes of a heathen idol in an Indiana Jones movie. You just know in the words of Randy Newman’s great song, AJ can not wait to “drop the big one.”

Then of course we have supporting characters including the Cholo in a red beret, the great hombre himself Hugo Chavez. He is the clown version of the traditional “my people love me” Latino strong man. For some unfathomable reason all the hip Hollywood “progressives” are now hobnobbing with Hugo. I will grant Fidel Castro some gravitas and a real histrionic swagger. But Hugo Chavez is a garden variety caudillo in the long and sleazy tradition of Latin American tyranny and megalomania. What in hell has got into Sean Penn and Oliver Stone among many others to get taken in by a central casting Latino Dictator? I just don’t see how he looks good in their eyes. Even serious left-wingers in Latin America are repulsed by Chavez and his macho postures and barely literate drivel and constant vulgarity.

In a recent interview, Chavez talked about how that world class gavacho intellectual Noam Chomsky had visited Venezuela and proclaimed it great and true democracy. Well, dude, if Noam Chomsky says you are the cat’s whiskers, you must be. Good old Noam is a guy who has spent his life telling us that day is night, black is white, lies are true, and down is really up. Only Noam could look at Hugo Chavez and see a great democratic leader, a banana republic Jefferson or Mandella. The rest of the world sees him as a cochino faced clown doing a world class job as the lord of misrule. At least we know sooner or later the oil money will run out and Hugo will end up hanged by his heels when his long suffering peons rise up and end the comedy. By the way Hugo announced he is opening a “peace base” in Cuba to help the poor Cubanos in case the gringos invade. And just think I didn't make any of this up.

It is only once a year that heads of government beeline it to Manhattan for the United Nation’s annual “open mike” week. What a great show. The only favorite world figure missing was North Korea’s beloved leader Kim.

Noriega's Basque Cafe in Bakersfield

Saturday night five of us drove up to Bakersfield for dinner at Noriega’s Hotel. It has been there, near the Union Pacific (formerly Southern Pacific) Station, since 1893. A time warp, it is pretty much like it was and has an authentic feel few places have.

You walk into an old simple brick building into a large bar with the dining room behind it. Unlike the three or four other Basque places in Bakersfield, Noriega’s is very much a traditional place. There are three very long tables with stout “jury room” chairs for about 200 people. Dinner is served in one sitting at seven or a little after with one meal for all hands. Parties are seated up and down the tables more or less in the order they checked in. On this Saturday night, the patrons included half a dozen birthday groups and a dozen of middle aged middle class motorcycle weekend warriors who had rolled up from Ventura County.

The food is basque style home cooking, cooking as it was in my grandmother’s day. It is good, but not serious four star basque cooking. If you want to eat that I recommend the Orozko Dinning Room at the Nugget Hotel Casino in Sparks Nevada. The family that owns the hotel serves beef, lamb and chickens from their ranch and a fine selection of wines from Navarra.

At Noriega’s it is a homey but very good and authentic meal. When you enter the room and are seated the smell is like a country farm house kitchen fifty years ago. It smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon with a mix of American and Portuguese dishes cooking. The Basques are generally recognized as the best cooks in Iberia and while not the same, their cooking is close to Portuguese and regional Spanish styles. But it has its unique qualities and a heavy influence from the French side of the Pyrenees.

Waiting on the table is a large salad bowl dressed with a blue cheese based variation on Caesar dressing. A large steaming tureen of cabbage and vegetable soup is seasoned to the point and very much homemade. Around it are a large platter of tongue slices in a clean white wine vinaigrette, a bowl of stewed pinto beans, a large basket of sliced french bread, butter, a bowl of herbed seasoned cottage cheese, a plate of homemade American potato salad and a bowl of red tomato and pepper basque salsa picante. It is just this side of very hot. The salsa is added to the soup or pinto beans to bring them to whatever level you prefer. Cuidado, it is muy picante.

The meal went on after the soup and first course were cleared away with a platter of spaghetti marinara that was as good as any I’ve ever had, heavily dusted with Parmesan cheese but with a clean fresh tomato taste. Then Broccoli florets in a white hollandaise and finally the oxtail stew. This was again very tasty like our grandmothers or great grandmothers would have made. It was in unthickened cooking juices and not heavy. Finally we go platters of very crispy fried chicken heavily sprinkled with sautéed garlic cloves and a platter of home style french fries. “We don’t have to worry about vampires,” was Mara’s comment. Oddly the pungent sweetness of the sautéed garlic on the chicken cut through any greasiness and made an interesting dish.

At dinner coffee is not put on the table, you have to ask for it. The bar has some interesting basque liqueurs if you want to try one. Les Fleurs des Pyrenees is very good as are some others. The cost was remarkable in this day and age. Dinner is $20 per person including bottles of a fruity "dago red." Children are charge one dollar per year up through age twelve. Reservations are recommended but not necessary if you arrive before six thirty. It is a wonderful simple and authentic meal if you are in Bakersfield or want to make a day trip. The main courses change each day in a regular sequence.

There are other Basque restaurants and the locals are very seriously split between Noriega's or the Woolgrowers Café as the best. Both have been around for a hundred years. Woolgrowers has a set piece dinner too, but offers a variety of main courses. The two times I've been there I would say the steaks and the lamb chops are first rate. A round of five Picon Punches, the traditional Basque aperitif at Noriega's bar was twenty bucks.