August 14, 2008--Rocks On the Rocks
I’ve never been in a water bar. You know, one of those places in New York or LA or Miami where you can get a pour of your Hoshizaki or Kold-Draft or, I guess, even the now-déclassé Evian.
There’s a part of me, though, that understands this. If you’re considering spending upwards of $1,500 for the latest Marc Jacobs bag, you need to sit down somewhere quiet to figure out if it’s worth it. And what better place to do so than in a setting of this kind where you can get something to drink which won’t scramble your senses. This is too serious an investment decision to have your thinking addled by a few ounces of early-afternoon alcohol.
Coming to this appreciation for the social purposes of the water bar was not easy for me. Though I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to get into drinking bottled water except in Europe where you basically have no choice. And, among other things, it’s not easy to appear cool sitting in a café on the Riviera or the Plaza de Santa Ana in Madrid with a glass of tap. Assuming you can even order such a thing.
And, in spite of my antipathy to bottled water, you won’t catch me attempting to. It’s hard enough trying to pass for a sophisticated American in Europe these days now that the dollar has turned into a version of Monopoly money. So for a couple of Euros I can hide behind a quarter of a liter of Pellegrino.
I grew up in New York City where the municipal water could pass almost any taste test, but beyond taste I’ve never been comfortable paying more for a gallon of Ferrarelle than for a gallon of gasoline—even at today’s sky-high prices.
But just as I’ve become almost comfortable with the idea of water bars, something new has come along for which I cannot muster any rationale or appreciation--not quiet designer ice cubes, but something close to that.
The New York Times reports that dinner guests are more and more showing up with their own bags of ice. In fear, it seems, that their hosts might serve them a highball or ice tea with ice that they made in the refrigerator, can you imagine, and with tap water to boot. (Article linked below.)
To be fair, some are into making their own ice more to devise ways to make it more effective when cooling drinks than out of concern for the kind of water out of which they are made. This may be a Green thing—the more high-tech the cube shape, in essence the more surface it presents to the liquid to be cooled, the more energy efficient the cube. QED. Something like that.
But then again, considering the way the conservation of energy works, the first law of thermodynamics to be specific, this also doesn’t make any sense. There’s just so much cooling energy you can extract from a given cube of ice. No matter its shape or configuration. Sorry to get into all this physics, but I’m trying hard to figure out this BYOI trend.
Then to make things even more complicated for me, I’m learning that there’s something called “chewable ice” and that some downtown folks are getting into it. Probably in Whole Foods, if they’re still in business after selling tons of E. coli beef, you can get Pearl Ice or Nugget Ice or Chewblet, which they say are chewable, falling somewhere in consistency between traditional refrigerator ice cubes and the kind of stuff you get in a Snow Cone. Since I’m still OK with Snow Cones, I think I’ll take a pass on this too.
In our house we sometimes do get into water spats. Rona is devoted to her Volvic while wherever we are—Europe excepted—I go for tap. This doesn’t present too many problems when it comes to water for drinking. But we do at times have a dust-up over ice cubes. Rona wants hers made from her Volvic while I insist tap ice cubes are good enough for proletarian me.
This means we have to maintain separate ice trays, and every once in a while they get mixed up in the freezer compartment—all right, that happens only when I’m the one preparing the iced drinks. I of course think they “taste” the same while Rona insists that not only are hers better but also purer and healthier.
She’s probably right. But for me the bottom line still remains—I’m saving my water money for gasoline.
There’s a part of me, though, that understands this. If you’re considering spending upwards of $1,500 for the latest Marc Jacobs bag, you need to sit down somewhere quiet to figure out if it’s worth it. And what better place to do so than in a setting of this kind where you can get something to drink which won’t scramble your senses. This is too serious an investment decision to have your thinking addled by a few ounces of early-afternoon alcohol.
Coming to this appreciation for the social purposes of the water bar was not easy for me. Though I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to get into drinking bottled water except in Europe where you basically have no choice. And, among other things, it’s not easy to appear cool sitting in a café on the Riviera or the Plaza de Santa Ana in Madrid with a glass of tap. Assuming you can even order such a thing.
And, in spite of my antipathy to bottled water, you won’t catch me attempting to. It’s hard enough trying to pass for a sophisticated American in Europe these days now that the dollar has turned into a version of Monopoly money. So for a couple of Euros I can hide behind a quarter of a liter of Pellegrino.
I grew up in New York City where the municipal water could pass almost any taste test, but beyond taste I’ve never been comfortable paying more for a gallon of Ferrarelle than for a gallon of gasoline—even at today’s sky-high prices.
But just as I’ve become almost comfortable with the idea of water bars, something new has come along for which I cannot muster any rationale or appreciation--not quiet designer ice cubes, but something close to that.
The New York Times reports that dinner guests are more and more showing up with their own bags of ice. In fear, it seems, that their hosts might serve them a highball or ice tea with ice that they made in the refrigerator, can you imagine, and with tap water to boot. (Article linked below.)
To be fair, some are into making their own ice more to devise ways to make it more effective when cooling drinks than out of concern for the kind of water out of which they are made. This may be a Green thing—the more high-tech the cube shape, in essence the more surface it presents to the liquid to be cooled, the more energy efficient the cube. QED. Something like that.
But then again, considering the way the conservation of energy works, the first law of thermodynamics to be specific, this also doesn’t make any sense. There’s just so much cooling energy you can extract from a given cube of ice. No matter its shape or configuration. Sorry to get into all this physics, but I’m trying hard to figure out this BYOI trend.
Then to make things even more complicated for me, I’m learning that there’s something called “chewable ice” and that some downtown folks are getting into it. Probably in Whole Foods, if they’re still in business after selling tons of E. coli beef, you can get Pearl Ice or Nugget Ice or Chewblet, which they say are chewable, falling somewhere in consistency between traditional refrigerator ice cubes and the kind of stuff you get in a Snow Cone. Since I’m still OK with Snow Cones, I think I’ll take a pass on this too.
In our house we sometimes do get into water spats. Rona is devoted to her Volvic while wherever we are—Europe excepted—I go for tap. This doesn’t present too many problems when it comes to water for drinking. But we do at times have a dust-up over ice cubes. Rona wants hers made from her Volvic while I insist tap ice cubes are good enough for proletarian me.
This means we have to maintain separate ice trays, and every once in a while they get mixed up in the freezer compartment—all right, that happens only when I’m the one preparing the iced drinks. I of course think they “taste” the same while Rona insists that not only are hers better but also purer and healthier.
She’s probably right. But for me the bottom line still remains—I’m saving my water money for gasoline.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
7:18 AM
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