Next Exit Observations: 10/03/16

Monday, October 3, 2016

I Want To Try These Dishes

11 Super Secret Off-Menu Items Worth Trying in Los Angeles

1 Fried Chicken Sandwich at Night + Market Song

Does a ranch dressing and papaya salad-topped fried chicken sandwich sound insanely delicious to you? It should, and Night + Market Song is the place to get it. Kris Yenbamroong fries Chieng Rai-style skin-on fried chicken thighs until deeply crisped, tops it with som tum papaya slaw, tomato, jalapenos, cilantro, and a carefully crafted house-made ranch dressing. The sandwich is offered at lunch and as an off-menu item at dinner at Song, and for dinner only at the West Hollywood location.

6 Pearl Menu at Herringbone

Ask for the secret Pearl Menu for a selection of grilled seafood items available only at the raw bar. These items aren’t available on the regular dinner menu, with seasonal highlights like hiramasa with paddlefish roe, yuzu koshu, white soy, micro shiso, and avocado, and whole Spanish mackerel with chimichurri, grilled lime, and black garlic.

Complete list (LA.Eater.com)

Congrats To Her!

This Female Driver Just Made American Racing History

With a 32-point lead coming into Petit Le Mans, all Christina Nielsen needed to do was meet her minimum drive time at the Petit season ender today to become the first woman to win a major present-day North American endurance championship. All we have to say is: it’s about time, and it couldn’t happen to a better person.

Nielsen barely missed the milestone last year, missing the GTD-class title in the then-named IMSA Tudor United Sports Car Championship by only two points during the Petit Le Mans season ender. It was her first full-time season in IMSA’s top-level endurance series, and she still finished second in the championship.

(Jalopnik.com)

There's A Method To The Madness

The Fascinating Company That Tears Cars Apart To Find Out Exactly How They're Built

Why Else Do Companies Need This Kind Of Detail?

Munro isn’t just there to help engineers learn about how the competition designs and assembles its cars, it’s also there to help automakers—who really should be called “auto assemblers”—figure out if they’re getting ripped off by their parts suppliers.

Knowing exactly how much it costs to build a wheel bearing, for example, can act as leverage for negotiation against a supplier of that part. At the same time, suppliers also go to Munro to learn. If, for example, one of their competitors is selling a part for what seems like impossibly too little, the supplier might ask Munro to tear it down and figure out how the competitor is saving cost.

Besides automotive and aerospace, Munro has worked with clients from the defense, marine, medical and the electronics industries. You name it, and Munro’s engineers tear it apart.

And that’s really their goal: they want to use their general manufacturing knowledge and their understanding of how various manufacturers accomplish certain tasks to help clients become more “lean”—to reduce time to market, to improve quality, to reduce research and development expenses, to reduce engineering and manufacturing costs, and to keep companies competitive.

Those are really the goals of competitive benchmarking in general, and Munro’s facility has demonstrated just to what lengths automakers go to scope out the competition.

(Jalopnik.com)