It's Mencken's birthday, and everyone in the newsroom is starving for terrapin stew. And a beer.
It took about three seconds to find some good Mencken writing on food and restaurants. He begins the essay "A Genial Restauranteur," from the collection "Newspaper Days, 1899-1906," with a defense of spelling: "I am well aware that the word restauranteur, as it appears in the title of this chapter, contains an n that the French eschew; my plea in confession and avoidance must be that I am not writing in French but American, and, specially, the American in vogue on the newspapers of my native Baltimorean in my salad days as journalist."
