Good piece Tony. I love Louisiana cuisine. You are right on.

Rules and regulations? Such as? This is the Northeast. All towns have rules and regulations. Hoboken just enforces theirs arbitrarily. I still almost get hit daily by motorists because cars are parked to close to the intersections often without tickets. On Sundays non-residents park all day in resident spots. Bikes ride on the sidewalks or the wrong way in traffic. Rules and regulations are the least of our problems.

Quality of life is generally low in Hoboken. Garbage is strewn across our cities streets. For a small town it is one of the DIRTIEST I have ever lived in. On the weekends the area around the PATH looks like a drunken DMZ. Almost routinely when I get off the PATH after working on a weekend night there is a fight at one of the local gin mills. There is also very little in the way of culture. We have one good musical venue, no good bookstore of which to speak, a bunch of middling restaurants, and a ton of empty storefronts on Washington Street because of the obscene rents and lack of interest in shopping locally. Go to Carroll Gardens Brooklyn and see what community looks like. While all this may sound very negative, I have been a resident here for a long time, and have seen most of what I loved about the city initially gradually decay or disappear.

Couple the above with unabated "luxury" residential development that adds little to the community and taxes the electrical and water grid and the city will continue to have brown outs, water main breaks, and structural failures.

I could have tolerated much of the above, but the HSPD of this year past has pushed me over the edge. If this is the quality of people our city attracts I would rather move elsewhere, and will do so.

I do live in a hole. It's called Hoboken. I will be moving shortly.

I should also mention that our building shares a long common hallway and I returned home to property which was vandalized, vomit in the hall, beer cans in front of my door, etc., and the common doorway's lock kicked in. Of course, at the time I return home from work, no one was around to cop for it. Stay classy Hoboken.

Yes. Worse than Mardi Gras. Most Mardi Gras activity occurs on the streets and in public establishments where the cops can keep an eye on the happenings. Also, Mardi Gras attracts a very varied crowd in age and demographics. It is the culmination of the Carnival Season. Food and music and community are just as important as drinking. The HSPD parade has nothing to do with community pride or Irish pride. It has everything to do with getting obscenely wasted and acting like a fool. The quality of people it attracts is LCD. I have been in Hoboken on and off since 1994, and it just gets worse and worse every year. Let them trash someone else's town. BTW, if you want to see a NJ SPD done right go to West Orange. Great parade, no problem with open containers (they allow it on parade day), and a generally fun atmosphere.

Hoboken St. Patrick's Day is the biggest collection of assholes ever assembled in one place. I just attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans and saw better behavior. I am tired of coming home after work and finding chicks throwing up in my hall, guys pissing off roof decks, fights, beer cans and garbage everywhere, and destruction of public property. It is a sham. If this is what fun looks like, I guess I don't know how to have fun. How is it that 100,000 can assemble in NYC without incident but Hoboken turns into a cesspool by noon.

Hoboken's motto should be "The City Without Pride." We let residents and outsiders take a big dump on our city each weekend; garbage and empty bottles are strewn all over town after most weekends and the entire city looks like a landfill after St. Patrick's Day. Pet owners leave feces everywhere, and more will be discovered as the snow continues to melt. Merchants and restauranteurs don't attend to their garbage in responsible fashion. And the lack of available trash receptacles outside of Washington Street frustrates those who actually want to responsibly dispose or refuse. I live in Hoboken out of necessity, but I am immensely saddened by how the town is and allows itself to be treated.

We will find out. If the menu is clear and makes sense and is well integrated; if the food is executed cleanly and doesn't try to get too cute; and most importantly, if he can survive the withering rents on Washington Street and do enough covers; he may just be okay. I don't believe in jinxed locations. What I do believe is some locations are not good price performers, i.e. the overhead just makes it impossible to turn a profit. The biggest problem with owning a restaurant in Hoboken is business is inconsistent. You way only be busy three days a week. That i one of the reasons he is staying open for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, to hopefully get enough foot traffic at different times to make the slow days break even. I have toyed with the idea of opening a place in Hoboken myself for a couple of years, but I have yet to find a location that makes sense. Good luck to the chef though. It is an extremely tough business and it is hard to find good people.

Tony,

I enjoyed your response, although I wish you had touched upon her contention that Cargill was trying to (and I paraphrase) respond to the problem of feeding the world. Before the world was globalized, people used to feed themselves locally through agriculture, ingenuity, foraging, and animal husbandry. They ate what was at hand and what they produced. Hunger was a problem then, as it is now, but most cultures found a way to get by, and even create some spectacular indigenous cuisine in the process. Now, we dump massive amounts of inferior food on cultures around the world and undermine their local economies at the same time.

I honestly don't see Cargill employees as evil either. I just don't think many of them will admit what drives there product is price and policy, not the health of the consumer. If Hannah wanted to be honest, she could understand that the growing practices of many of the large feedlots are the causes of many of the modern diseases, such as E-Coli. Anyone who would claim that these decisions are not profit driven is naive as well. Still, overall nice response.

Instead of asking people to do the right thing, which seems problematic in this town, why don't we just lower the speed limit. With the amount of distracted drivers, oblivious pedestrians, errant bikers, etc., we would all do well with a little less speed. The less speed and automobile traffic in this town, the better.