If beauty is in the eye of the beholder — if one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor — how exactly might zoning laws be written to split the difference fairly?
During the waning days of Prague’s communist era, and for a few years shortly thereafter, I always made it a point when visiting to cross the Charles Bridge to the oldest part of the city on the castle side of the Vltava, and begin sniffing my way to a certain hospoda (a tavern, or pub, usually specializing in beer).
At the time I had this route memorized, although the name of the establishment now eludes me. The point is that one needed only get somewhat close to it, especially in summer, when the smell of its pivní sýr (beer cheese) would guide seekers like me home.
Shall we posit “pungent” and “aggressive” as suitable adjectives to describe the olfactory sensation?
The beer cheese was aromatic and delicious, fitting hand in glove with the typically wonderful Czech pilsner-style beer. Ingredients included stinky mild cheese (Olomoucké tvarůžky, Maršovský, or Jarošovský, among others), paprika, caraway seeds, maybe a bit of onion and garlic, with everything mashed together to make the cheese spreadable on rye bread with butter and a few dabs of mustard.
My sampling may have been small, but (a) platter after platter of beer cheese kept coming out from the back of the hospoda; (b) leftovers or doggy bags were entirely unheard of; and (c) the fact that the “odor” drifted through the neighborhood was widely regarded as an appetizing and brilliant marketing strategy, not something to be avoided, banned or shunned.
Meanwhile, returning to present times and the American genius for kill-joy, me-first griping, this article at Eater Portland (Oregon): A Portland Vietnamese Restaurant Has Closed Because a Neighbor Kept Complaining About the Smell, by editor If you don’t like the smell of cooking food, maybe don’t live near a restaurant?”
A Fremont Vietnamese restaurant has closed its doors due to a neighbor’s complaints about the restaurant’s smell. Pho Gabo, which operates three locations in the Portland area, has closed its Fremont and Northeast 73rd location indefinitely due to “the city’s and the neighborhood’s complaints about the smell of the food that we grill and the foods that we serve customers,” according to a sign posted to the restaurant’s door.
Willamette Week reports that the...Read more
