The lady had dropped her napkin

The lady had dropped her napkin.
 

More accurately, she had hurled it to the floor in a fit of disillusionment, her small protest against the slow creep of mediocrity and missed cues during a four-hour dinner at Per Se that would cost the four of us close to $3,000. Some time later, a passing server picked up the napkin without pausing to see whose lap it was missing from, neatly embodying the oblivious sleepwalking that had pushed my guest to this point.
 

Such is Per Se’s mystique that I briefly wondered if the failure to bring her a new napkin could have been intentional. The restaurant’s identity, to the extent that it has one distinct from that of its owner and chef, Thomas Keller, is based on fastidiously minding the tiniest details. This is the place, after all, that brought in a ballet dancer to help servers slip around the tables with poise. So I had to consider the chance that the server was just making a thoughtful accommodation to a diner with a napkin allergy.
 

But in three meals this fall and winter, enough other things have gone awry in the kitchen and dining room to make that theory seem unlikely. Enough, also, to make the perception of Per Se as one of the country’s great restaurants, which I shared after visits in the past, appear out of date. Enough to suggest that the four-star rating it received from Sam Sifton in 2011, its most recent review in The New York Times, needs a hard look.
 

Pete Wells of the NYTimes drops Per Se from 4 stars to 2.

I have no idea if Wells is right or not, but I can't think of too many other food writers who can make a restaurant review as pleasurable to read. Writing about food is like writing about music; language can feel like an inadequate medium for describing something which we experience through our senses, bypassing the symbolic representations of words. Wells avoids those traps by, in large part, not trying to describe tastes.

Through the eyes of a burglar

Geoff Manaugh's upcoming book A Burglar's Guide to the City sounds great:

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again.
 

At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.
 

With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut.
 

Full of real-life heists-both spectacular and absurd-A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.
 

The book streets April 5, 2016.

Gonna make you sweat

If I were to tell you that there was an entire industry that overcharged the vast majority of its customers, but those customers were fully aware they were being robbed, and that was the only way to make the business viable, what would you guess?

If you’re a member of a gym, you will be aware that for the first month of the year the place is horribly packed out with sweaty and unfit people, all the classes are booked up and you can’t get on any of the machines you want. If your interaction with the keep-fit industry is more along the lines of walking past the gym on the way to the cake shop, you might be more aware of the equally curious fact that commercial gyms always seem to have a heavily advertised ‘special’ membership deal going on. Paying the full whack listed rate at a gym is actually a pretty difficult thing to do — much more so than paying full freight rack-rate for a hotel room — unless you do the single most expensive thing you can do in physical culture, and join the gym shortly after the Christmas holidays.

SWEATY BETTY Having seen the books of a gym chain or two, we can tell you that the ‘Sweaty January’ phenomenon is not an urban myth or a joke — it’s absolutely fundamental to the economics of the industry and it’s basically impossible to run an economically viable gym without taking it into account. Usually about 75 per cent of all gym memberships are taken out in the month of January. Not only this, but the economics of the industry absolutely depend on the fact that a very great proportion of January joiners will not visit more than three or four times in total before their membership comes to a floundering flop of weight not lost at the end of the year. The founder of Colman’s Mustard used to claim that his fortune was based on the bit of mustard that everyone left behind on their plate, but gym memberships have really pushed things to the limit when it comes to this model of making people pay for a lot more of the product than they have any likelihood of using.

On the bizarre economics of gyms. The spatial inefficiency of gyms is something I hadn't ever spent much time thinking about.

Human nature being as immutable as it is, most gyms are great investments (other than Bally Total Fitness, which reached too far, too fast). In fact, human nature is so predictable that a company like Planet Fitness can come along and offer memberships for just $10 a month and still not be overrun with people. It's found money.

If you're feeling particularly fitness motivated this month, maybe wait a month and see if the impulse passes along with the January prices.

Spectre by Radiohead

James Bond movies have enlisted a diverse set of artists across the years for its theme songs, but I wouldn't have put Radiohead on that list. But I listened to their rejected theme song offering for Spectre, and it's not bad. I can almost picture a retired James Bond, making some spiked, artisanal hot chocolate in a log cabin, snapping a selfie with his hot young wife to post to Instagram.

Last year we were asked to write a theme tune for the Bond movie Spectre. Yes we were. It didn’t work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much. As the year closes we thought you might like to hear it. Merry Christmas. May the force be with you.

Santa Claus converts Scrooge with new economics

Noted activist investor Scrooge has changed his mind about Santa Claus.

It is not an exaggeration to say that I have undergone a complete conversion in my view of St Nicholas. Warren Buffett advises investors to seek exceptional managers and I now see that few achieve your longevity.
 

You embodied the new economy before the idea had been conceived. St Nicholas is a global business, receiving signals from far corners of the earth and delivering packets over an integrated network. It works at super-high speed, faster than broadband in South Korea, and knows no boundaries. The internet is antique by comparison.
 

Your lack of interest in profitability struck the traditionalist in me as foolish but I have come to understand the virtues of reinvesting revenues over several centuries in order to dominate your market and entrench your monopoly. 
 

Jeff Bezos, your closest logistics competitor, has copied your tactics but, although Amazon crushes small shops, department stores and big box retailers, it cannot topple you.
 

This has helped you to build the biggest social network in the world, putting Facebook to shame. Everyone includes your messages in cards and parents pretend the gifts they buy for their children come from you — you outsource many deliveries at zero cost. By combining a jolly presence with sophisticated viral marketing, you have expanded your reach everywhere