​There is no shortage of restaurant recommendations online. But in places where there is a shortage of strong Wi-Fi signals, the Internet's wisdom is largely useless, forcing hungry tourists to find great meals by other means.

I'm a firm believer in asking food-and-beverage staffers for restaurant suggestions, since they're attuned to the local dining scene and typically have pretty practiced palates. Yet when I found myself stranded in Victoria this week by extremely high winds, I wondered which other workers might be the source of reliable restaurant advice. I consulted five likely founts of culinary intelligence, and -- according to the rules I established for the game -- went exactly where my informants told me go. As much as I wished someone would send me to a Senegalese buffet or a Cambodian noodle house, I learned lunch is still synonymous with sandwiches. Fortunately for me, Victoria seems to have mastered the genre.

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​The official season for white meat/dark meat debates ends as soon as the last Thanksgiving leftover is eaten, but the topic surfaced in our newsroom again this week after managing editor Caleb Hannan had an apparently traumatic experience at Skillet Diner involving a chicken thigh.

Hannan and his fiancee this weekend ordered a couple of fried chicken sammies, taking care not to order the chicken and waffles, which the menu clarifies is made with dark meat. But the sandwiches turned out to be thigh vehicles too, causing the white meat fans to gag on what Hannan calls "gaminess." "When a menu says chicken, don't you assume it's the breast?," he asked me.

I don't. I figure the chef will use whichever part of the chicken is best suited for the dish. While that's frequently a breast, chefs who prize flavor aren't adverse to working with legs and thighs. If I received an unanticipated thigh, I'd be pretty psyched.

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​A full 40 percent of New Year's resolution-makers are fixated on financial goals, which makes me feel either very trendy or very cliched.

Although I don't usually bother with resolutions, I was recently able to pay off most of my credit card debt (which says absolutely nothing about my management skills and everything about how few banks are willing to entrust me with their money.) Currently, my only card with an outstanding balance is the card I use to purchase liquor on review meals. A nightly cocktail isn't a cheap ritual when practiced in restaurants: The annual cost is about $4,000. Add in the bottles of wine that inevitably get ordered when I have more than one review companion, and I've drunk a 1987 Ford Mustang's worth in alcohol by year's end.

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​I didn't take a beach vacation this winter, but my mother was conscientious in sending me daily dispatches from her Aruba trip. The e-mails, which could have been ghost-written by the island's tourism bureau, extolled sunny skies, warm seawater and the pleasures of drinking a rare strawberry daiquiri in a thatch hut. She also updated me on her restaurant meals, including a character sketch of her favorite chef.

"Apparently, people have the nerve to ask him for recipes of his dishes," she wrote. "He does comply & comes out to the table & writes them down for the customer, not even leaving out a critical ingredient."

I've never considered it poor form to ask for a recipe in a restaurant: I'd always assumed the chef would consider the request a compliment. But an informal survey of acquaintances suggests many diners who -- like my parents -- eat out no more than four or five times a month, have consigned the practice to the rude column. They apparently figure asking a chef for a recipe is like asking a janitor for his broom. Or, more precisely, like asking a janitor for his broom and then starting to sweep the floor, since the request implies the receiver is capable of doing a better job than the pro.

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​After listening to my Christmas night lecture on the history of Chinese-American restaurants, an attendee who'd managed not to be distracted by host restaurant Tai Tung's spinning lazy Susans, freighted with chop suey, chow mein, almond chicken and sweet and sour spareribs, had a very fair question: Where did the crab Rangoon come from?

Unlike most dishes on the standard Chinese-American menu, which have authentic Chinese antecedents, the presence of dairy marks Rangoon - also known as crab wontons and crab puffs, depending on the region - as an interloper. Although milk has long been a staple of northern Chinese diets, the Cantonese immigrants responsible for the nation's first successful chop suey joints didn't come from dairy traditions. It never occurred to them to fry cream cheese in a wonton wrapper.

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​Whole Foods is again running its "Bag Hunger" campaign, urging customers to tack a few extra dollars to their grocery bills so the supermarket chain can purchase tuna fish, peanut butter, soup and other commodities for neighbors in need. Last year, the drive netted $43,000 in the Seattle metro area.

"We purchased roughly 21,000 pounds of food and delivered it in nice pallets," recalls spokesman David Hulbert.

While $43,000 is surely a tiny fraction of Whole Foods' total holiday revenue, it's a significant sum for food banks, which are grappling with supply shortages and increasing demand. According to the USDA, more than one in seven U.S. households last year experienced "food insecurity," defined as a lack of access to enough food for a healthy, active life.

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​I recently received an e-mail from a reporter asking whether I was free to discuss "the tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas Eve." (I wrote an academic article on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food, so fielding these queries is my own annual holiday tradition.)

Christmas Eve? I've been marking the Christian holiday with lo mein my entire life, and it never occurred to me that the festive meal could be scheduled for Dec. 24. Eating Chinese is what Jews do on Christmas Day, ideally after catching the latest Woody Allen movie.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, what's the difference? While there's a Jewish tendency to pick quibbles, I think this debate is worth pursuing. When Jews started patronizing Chinese restaurants on Christmas, they weren't especially interested in forging a tradition that could be handed down from generation to generation. They were hungry, and so went to the only open restaurants they could find.

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​There are countless ways that service can go bad: Servers can be rude, robotic, clumsy, forgetful, uninformed, filthy, intrusive, confused or absent. In reviewing my notes on eight months of Seattle eating, I was struck by how many local servers fall into the final category. The word "neglectful" crops up with astounding frequency.

I've had more bad service experiences than good since moving here, an imbalance that could be attributed to my lousy luck and a preponderance of lazy restaurant workers. But while it's possible I've encountered a few dud servers who aren't capable of promptly clearing plates and refilling drinks, my years waiting tables taught me that most front-of-the-house staffers are hard workers who take their jobs seriously, whether they live in Seattle or Savannah. Although it can be difficult to remember when I've been waiting 15 minutes for someone to greet my table, I don't think the fault lies with the servers. I believe Washington has inadvertently legislated bad service.

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​Over at the Daily Weekly yesterday, Caleb Hannan called out Slate for celebrating Nathan Myhrvold as a catalyst for innovation without mentioning upfront that the former Microsoft exec is a known patent troll. While Slate's Jacob Weisberg says interview outtakes addressing the issue will surface in an upcoming podcast, the omission didn't surprise me: Here in the food world, Myhrvold's day job as a patent hoarder is never discussed.

Myhrvold's epic Modernist Cuisine didn't make much a splash down in Dallas, where I was living when the $625, seven-volume cookbook was released. But his theories are central to culinary conversations in his hometown, where he's hailed as a hero for deciphering braising and masterminding cutaway photos of steaming broccoli. I was so sold on Myhrvold's contributions to gastronomy that when I heard a teaser for a This American Life segment portraying Myhrvold as an intellectual bully, I couldn't believe it was the same guy who revealed the secrets of carrot air.

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​This picture of a food truck branded by a major Southern biscuit chain, recently surfaced on Twitter, accompanied by the caption "I'm all for food trucks, but this kind of ruins the spirit."

There's nothing scrappy and inventive about a food truck serving Jack in the Box tacos or Carl's Jr. burgers. For fans of food truck culture, it's unsettling when multimillion dollar franchises co-opt a concept that's supposed to celebrate independence. But with a significant number of restaurant chains projected to put rolling units on the road in coming years, I started wondering whether a wheeled fast-food restaurant is really all bad.

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