New and Old #277
What a restaurant can be, owning a restaurant, an alternate technological path for TVs (?), and a curious pasta shape
Littler, Part 1, On Housing, Aaron Lubeck, June 5, 2025
Littler is extremely well-curated. The local chef/owner, Gray Brooks, is well-known (He also owns Pizzeria Toro). He creates short and simple menus; everything is good, and nothing isn’t. The interior ambiance is composed of rich wood, brick walls, and string lights. There is no design noise here, but there is analog sound: a record player flanks the bar. You can bring your own vinyl, which they will play while you dine.
In this setting, with this backdrop, many a memorable night has been had. Everything about Littler is emphatically local. Unlike a Chipotle, it’s sad when a place like this closes. It feels like a funeral. It’s depressing to see something inspiring come to an end.
What strikes me about this is how it echoes one of the tiny Japanese businesses of the sort I’ve just been writing about recently. It’s not just a business well-executed; it’s done at a scale which is conducive to meshing with a particular person’s quirky style and character.
More from Lubeck:
Some of my favorites [inspiring places] are Press Coffee and Crepes, a modern Parisian-style cafe designed by Julie Cahoon of Mint Architecture, and Aaktun (video below), a Tulum and Tiki-inspired cafe by James Beard nominee Oscar Diaz. At Aaktun, the developer (CityPlat) worked with multiple restauranteurs to turn a light industrial park into Durham’s next great “place.” On the interior, the creative finishing and lighting blow guests away.
Small storefront businesses like these are worthy of study because they foster diversity across all neighborhoods and price points. Taken collectively, they are precisely what makes a city, a people, and a culture.
This is a really great piece and there’s more. Check it out.
Son of a Pizzaman, Alex of Saint Francis Apizza, June 19, 2026
Nice little point here:
I’d just signed up for the biggest project of my life, to date, by starting my own business (which for context, my wife is not directly involved in) when we got the happiest news of our lives. As overjoyed as I was to learn that I’d soon be a dad, I initially couldn’t help feeling like the timing couldn’t be worse. I had been prepared to go all in on my restaurant dream. Burn the lifeboats. Never save anything for the swim back.
Looking back on it now, becoming a dad saved me from completely subscribing to this dangerous mindset. My desire to be a loving, present dad for my son has forced me to tread water, to ask for help, to remember to save something for the swim back.
We can all contain multitudes:
There is a selfishness in my desire to grow and feel fully engaged with life in all the ways I naturally want to. At my best, I’m a small-time visionary. I can imagine how great things might be, and I can — usually — make them happen. At my worst, I move too impulsively, without adequate consideration of those closest to me, like I’m driving a car full of passengers too fast and don’t realize they’re all getting carsick. We might get to our destination but it isn’t pretty.
Becoming a parent and a business owner has meant small sacrifices like always having my phone close by. While I’ve ‘gotten away’ by traveling many times, I have never fully ‘unplugged’ in five years. There’s some bizarre compartmentalizing that happens. Just last weekend on a quick family getaway, I was feeling some of the most intense joy and connection of my entire life as I took my son on his first water park ride, holding his little hand as he shrieked with unbridled joy; then I immediately speed-walked to my phone to answer a question about pizza boxes (it was a Friday night after all).
Very nice piece.
Did CRT displays reach their peak image quality before production ended?, Facebook
As maybe you’ve gathered, I’m a bit of a tube TV nerd and nostalgist. This is an interesting question: did we reach the technical peak of the technology around or before the time it fell out of use and production, or was there some alternate path where picture tubes kept getting better and, had that path continued to now, would be superior to the top-of-the-lines televisions from the CRT heyday?
Some interesting answers:
The ones around 2004 were peak of the technology of the high definition CRT. After here they went downhill as was a cost compared to output.
I think the screen would have to be so thick to match the clarity of today’s led/lcd/ and plasmas it wouldn’t be cost effective to continue. Then other factors like weight, heat, power consumption a losing battle.
There were actually many patents and breakthroughs that could have improved CRTs, but market forces and consumer habits prevented the next big jumps from happening.
I think we probably reached the peak of clarity, and black/color levels. We didn’t quite reach the resolution peak, but some monitors can come close to 4k at certain refresh rates. We also probably reached the practical size peak at 36 inches. Even a bit bigger and they just become almost impossible to move. Even if something like a 70 inch CRT could be made, you’d need a forklift to get it onto the stand.
On the resolution question, another commenter points out: “There’s a bit of a misunderstanding here. Yes, you could get obscenely resolutions to be displayed on a CRT but they did not have the dot pitch to accurately resolve the image. In fact, the advertised/highest resolution is often beyond its ability to properly resolve.”
A couple more:
I’m sure that small, incremental improvements could have been made, but CRTs would have always been limited by size. A 32” flat wide-screen HDTV already had to have incredibly thick glass. They were bulky, monstrously heavy, and very costly to manufacture. I can lift a 32” LCD TV with one hand. You needed two men to lift the same in a CRT. From there, the amount of glass needed to reinforce a vacuum tube grew exponentially, even with tiny increases in size.
More or less, yes. People have this fantasy of CRTs being an alternative tech tree but it was genuinely a dead technology. There were just too many limitations when it came to brightness, size, resolution, and accuracy. All for no real benefit.
I find these kinds of speculative questions really interesting. If you stop a mature technology somewhere in the middle of its development, and imagine it being replaced, people would basically think its limit had been reached. And the next incremental improvements or breakthroughs are not always obvious.
Radiatori (radiator shaped pasta), The Pasta Project, Jacqui Debono, April 10, 2017
Radiatori is a relatively new shape in the world of pasta, especially in light of the fact that pasta is said to date back to the times of Ancient Rome and perhaps even further! I have come across two schools of thought on the origins of radiatori pasta. Some believe it was created at some point between the two great wars, but the mostly commonly held opinion is that it was designed in the 1960s and is reminiscent of the shape of metallic car radiator grills or old-fashioned heating fixtures. The Italian word ‘radiatori’ translates literally to radiators in English. Some pasta makers claim to have based the design of their radiatori shape on the radiator grill of the Bugatti motor car. Given the Italians love for their car designers, that is an easy thing to believe!
We bought these and they were fun to eat! Our favorite supermarket down here, Wegmans, actually makes this under their store brand, which is pretty uncommon. It’s interesting that nobody seems to know when the shape was actually invented. I looked it up and all of the sources give both possibilities, or just one without any further proof. I wonder how much we really don’t quite know.
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