| On those iced tea orders, specify everything to a T
Now that a dining companion has taken to ordering iced tea "60-40" -- the desired ratio of sweet to unsweet -- and not been shot, I've decided there's no excuse for anything but clear communication between diner and server about tea. Not to mention everything else. So I appreciated a recent thread on a food Web site about missing modifiers -- words that servers should volunteer for clarity or that diners should ask further about, to be sure. People complained about ordering "tea" and not getting what they wanted. Some wanted plain and got fruit-flavored; some wanted sweet and got unsweet, some wanted hot and got cold (no, they weren't from around here). So whose responsibility is this? Everyone's, in an ideal world. But barring that, I'd break it down this way: • Diners should specify sweet or unsweet or hot when they expect basic and ubiquitous orange pekoe (which is a form of black tea: think Lipton).
Mrs T meets Mrs T for a nice cup of tea
Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the leaders of Ukraine's Orange revolution, came to pay homage yesterday at the feet of Baroness Thatcher, the veteran former leader of the Conservative party. The two diminutive, blonde, female, former Prime Ministers sat down to tea at the Goring Hotel in London to discuss the dark days of the Cold War - and possibly also motherhood, pearls and iconic political hairdos. Mrs Tymoshenko, whose advisers were cheekily billing the private meeting as "Mrs T meets Mrs T", praised Lady Thatcher as Britain's saviour and thanked her for championing freedom for the former Soviet bloc states of Eastern Europe. Political observers say that Mrs Tymoshenko, the fiercely ambitious leader of the Ukrainian opposition, may have been hoping for some of the Iron Lady's stardust to rub off on her campaign, as elections near on September 30.
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