Frank Hecker

This is a very rare week (the first one in years) in which I’ve been left at home to take care of the pets and work past my usual stopping time. Tonight I decided to take a break and check out Pure Wine Café, a new wine bar in downtown Ellicott City. I’d noticed it some time ago while driving and walking down Main Street, had checked it out on the web, and thought it might be a nice place to relax after work. I was not disappointed.

You can read more about it at the Baltimore Sun and Urbanspoon. Pure Wine Café (no “The”, thank you very much; they’re inconsistent about using the acute accent, but I’ll do so) also has its menu and wine list online—unless you have an iPhone, since the menu and wine list are in Flash. That’s a major shame, because the iPhone demographic is exactly what Pure Wine Café is targeted at: people who like a combination of sophistication and approachability, and don’t mind paying a bit of a premium to obtain it.

When I stopped by the place was not crowded but had enough people there that I didn’t feel lonely. The physical space is intimate, with an air of informal elegance; there’s a U-shaped bar and several small tables. (They have nice aluminum chairs too, maybe the famous Emeco Navy chair or a variant—it’s the sort of place that makes you think of things like that.) Since this was my first visit I put myself at the mercy of the staff, and was fortunate to get some great recommendations from the sommelier, Mark Bowman. I went with his advice and had the roasted rosemary fennel paired with a glass of Fuente Milano 2008 and the honey-whipped chevre paired with a glass of Klemens Weber Riesling Halbtrocken 2007 (if I recall correctly). (Incidentally, I very much appreciate Pure Wine Café selling wine in 2 oz. glasses; I’m not up to drinking a lot of wine, and think it’s a much better approach than restricting myself to a single 5 oz. glass.)

The first pairing was pretty near perfect. I like fennel and absolutely love pancetta lardons; it was a great savory experience and the Fuente Milano complemented it very well. The second pairing was a tad on the sweet side; nice, but not as transcendent as the first. Since I wasn’t looking to make this a major meal I stopped there in terms of food. They have a few desserts (not listed on the web site, I don’t know why), but it’s the sort of place that really calls for a dessert wine, so I had a 2 oz. glass of La Malaga from Tenuta La Meridiana (I think—again, the dessert wines and other after-dinner drinks aren’t listed on the web site).

The total bill came to just over $30 including tip, and in my opinion was well worth it; if I get a chance sometime I’ll definitely go back. They have a (small) selection of beers and a full bar, so if JessieX can get around to scheduling another blogger cocktail party (hint, hint!) I think it would be the perfect place to have one.

I don’t normally do restaurant reviews, but I thought I’d do a quick one for the Coal Fire Pizza in Ellicott City, since it just opened and I was among the first crowd of folks who ate there. (For other reactions see the post at Howchow.) Basically it’s a nice upscale casual place with good pizza and other tasty offerings. It’s a tad expensive if you order a lot (over $70 for three people in our case, without any alcoholic drinks included), but I’d definitely go back.

I’ll start from the beginning: Coal Fire Pizza is in the small retail center that’s part of the Shipley’s Grant development off Route 108 south of Route 100 and west of Snowden River Parkway. The center is quite nice (and previously praised by Wordbones); it’s marred only by being adjacent to the high-voltage power lines that divide the Shipley’s Grant site in half. Coal Fire Pizza itself has a restaurant area and a separate bar (each with its own door, though the areas connect); the decor is nicely done in tones of brown, but a bit bare and corporate for my taste. (It could use some artwork on the walls.)

Though the restaurant was almost full the wait staff were helpful and seemed to be doing pretty well for a restaurant open only two days. We ordered two pizzas (12-inch Margherita and 12-inch with pepperoni, mushroom, and banana peppers), two salads (The Coal Fire and the grilled Caesar), and the Chesapeake mac and cheese:

• The Coal Fire salad was romaine lettuce and grape tomatoes with (very thick) bacon and pecans, served with a sweet honey mustard vinaigrette dressing. A very nice salad, with enough bacon to satisfy anyone; I would definitely order this again. However the dressing is laid on a bit thick; I recommend getting it on the side. The salad has artisan bread served on the side instead of croutons; it’s good bread, and a nice touch.
• The grilled Caesar is a twist on the normal Caesar salad, made with a single stalk of romaine lettuce that’s grilled a bit. This was less successful to my mind, because it somewhat lacked the crispiness I like in a Caesar salad. However my dining companion loved it, and likened it to a classic wilted salad. (I’ll note though that wilted salads are traditionally made by pouring hot dressing over the salad; in Coal Fire Pizza’s grilled Caesar the salad dressing is cold.) This salad also came with artisan bread on the side.
• The Chesapeake Mac & Cheese is a traditional macaroni and cheese with crab meat added, baked a bit with a crumb topping. It’s a great dish for kids who like both macaroni and cheese and crabcakes, and a wonderful guilty pleasure for adults.
• The Margherita pizza was a classic pizza recipe (cheese, basil, tomato sauce), done well. The crust was thin but help up well, and nicely browned at the edges (to blackness in a couple of spots).
• The other pizza was notable for its sauce. Coal Fire Pizza offers a choice of three sauces, classic (traditional marinara sauce, what’s on the Margherita), spicy, and signature (a mix of the two). For this pizza we ordered the spicy sauce. It was quite spicy, not overly so but perhaps more spicy than most people want on a pizza; in future I’d probably order the signature sauce instead.

As best I can tell Coal Fire Pizza doesn’t serve any desserts; at least none are on the menu, and we weren’t offered any. However you can just walk across the parking lot to a Cold Stone Creamery outlet—a quite popular one, judging by the line stretched outside the door. There’s also a Starbucks if you want coffee, and The Wine Seller (a spinoff from Decanter Fine Wines in the Hickory Ridge Village Center) if you want to do your drinking at home.

All in all we were quite happy with our visit to Coal Fire Pizza, and definitely plan to eat there again. It’s a great place to get good pizza in Howard County, and if you share pizzas with others and go easy on the appetizers it would be a relatively cheap meal. (Though there are definitely appetizers I’d like to try, including the thin-cut fries, onion rings, and baked chicken wings with Vidalia onions.)

One final note: In a sign of both the times and the locale, the Coal Fire Pizza menu goes to great lengths to reassure us that it uses only anthracite, the cleanest type of coal … virtually free of smoke and particulate emissions, extracted almost exclusively from previous disturbed sites, not virgin territory, where the surrounding ecosystem is rescued and revived via a special Federal program. So don’t worry, Howard Countians: it’s not just good pizza, it’s green pizza!

In a previous post I investigated the question of whether those in Howard County with annual incomes of $120,000 or more truly constituted the wealthy few or not. (The answer: No.) Key to that investigation was the idea of median household income, as reported by the US Census Bureau in its annual Amercian Community Survey. It turns out that the ACS data provide some interesting insights into what makes Howard County special, and can help explain the nature of the conflicts that have raged over the future of Howard County in general and Columbia in particular.

In this post I’ll start with a concept that is easy to understand but has interesting implications, namely median income and its relationship to average (or mean) income. Let’s suppose we want to look at household incomes in Howard County or any other jurisdiction. We can compute the mean income (to use the preferred term) by adding all the household incomes and then dividing by the number of households. To simplify things, let’s assume we have only 10 households with incomes as follows:

$16,000
$37,000
$56,000
$75,000
$92,000
$111,000
$132,000
$163,000
$190,000
$317,000

The sum of all incomes is $1,189,000, and then we divide by 10 to get an mean (or average) income of $118,900. Simple enough, right?

Wrong. The problem with mean income is that it doesn’t necessarily represent the reality for the typical household, because it can be skewed by households that have either disproportionately small or (especially) disproportionally large income. For example, let’s suppose that the highest-income household in our example greatly increases its income (perhaps they’ve been the beneficiary of a successful IPO, for example), so that the incomes now look as follows:

$16,000
$37,000
$56,000
$75,000
$92,000
$111,000
$132,000
$163,000
$190,000
$1,558,000

The total of all 10 household incomes is now $2,430,000, which divided by 10 gives a mean household income of $243,000. Thus the mean household income has more than doubled, but the typical household (9 out of 10 of them, in this example) sees no improvement in its own income.

To correct for this distortion the Census Bureau and others use a different measure of household income, namely median income. The median income is the income that falls in the middle: half of all incomes are lower, and half are higher. In the example we have five households with income of $92,000 or less, and five households with income of $111,000 or greater. We then compute the median income as the value halfway between these two incomes, or $101,500. (This happens to be very close to the Howard County median household income of $101,672 in 2007; as will become apparent later, I deliberately chose these example numbers to create a microcosm of Howard County.)

Note that in computing the median income we didn’t specify whether we were using the first set of incomes or the second set of incomes (in which the highest-income household greatly increased its income). That’s because it doesn’t matter: the median income is exactly the same in both cases. Using median income thus avoids the distortion inherent in average income, where (as the economics joke goes), Bill Gates can walk into a bar and cause the average income to skyrocket.

But using median income has its own problems as well. Suppose that instead of walking into a bar, Bill Gates moved to Howard County. Or to achieve the same overall effect, 50 billionaires moved into Howard County, or 500 people worth $100M each. There are almost 100,000 households in Howard County, so adding a few hundred super-rich families isn’t going to affect the county’s median income at all (just as making one family wealthier didn’t affect median income in our toy example). But can anyone doubt that such an influx would change the character of Howard County in major ways?

How could this effect be quantified? That will be the subject of a future post.

Last night a post by local blogger Wordbones caught my eye. Based on a story in the Baltimore Sun, it discussed proposed plans for affordable housing in Columbia Town Center, housing that would be reserved for those with income of less than $80,000 (10% of total units) or those with income between $80,000 and $120,000 (another 10% of total units). Wordbones particularly noted a quote in the article from Alan Klein of the Coalition for Columbia’s Downtown:

Klein noted that 80 percent of the 5,500 residential units planned would be for people making more than $120,000, which he defined as the wealthy few. It seems like a pretty elite group, said Klein, referring to the 20 percent [of units reserved for those making less than $120,000] as a drop in the bucket.

Wordbones questioned this characterization, and I myself was curious as to whether it was really true. When in doubt the best rule is to go to the data, which in this case are from the annual American Community Survey [1] produced by the US Census Bureau. In some comments on Wordbones’s blog I referenced the 2006 ACS data, but as it turns out the 2007 ACS estimates were just released, as highlighted in a recent Columbia Flier story about Howard County being the third-wealthiest county in the country.

So what do the data say? According to the detailed breakdown of household income for Howard County in 2007, about 37% of Howard County households have incomes of $125,000 or more [2]; if we add in the households between $120,000 and $125,000, and also allow for the effects of wage inflation over the past year, almost 40% of Howard County households (or nearly two out of five) are part of Alan Klein’s pretty elite group.

But wait, there’s more! The ACS distinguishes households from families [3]; among other things, the ACS definition of family excludes people living alone. If we look at the detailed data for Howard County family income for 2007 we find that 46% of Howard County families have family incomes of $125,000 or more. Also, the median Howard County family income for 2007 was $115,907, meaning 50% of Howard County families had income higher than that. So if we again add in the effects of wage inflation it’s likely that Alan Klein’s weathy few (for whom 80% of the proposed units are reserved intended) includes half the families in Howard County.

To give Klein his due, $120,000 is an unusually high income for the US as a whole; detailed household income data for the entire US show that only 12% of US households had income of $125,000 or more in 2007, and the corresponding data for family income show that less than 16% of US families had family income above that level. This underscores the unusual position of Howard County as a very wealthy jurisdiction. Wordbones doubted whether any typical family in Columbia with a household income of $120,000 sees themselves as being wealthy, and in the context of Howard County at least he’s absolutely right.

Notes:

1. The ACS is a survey based on random samples, not a comprehensive survey like the ten-year census. Because of that there is some sampling error in the results, such that the true figures might be a few percentage points higher or lower. I’ve ignored this in my discussion (as do most press stories on the ACS data).
2. ACS figures are in 2007 inflation-adjusted dollars. I wondered a bit about what this meant until I figured it out: ACS data are taken throughout the year, and wage inflation over the course of the year causes incomes to increase slowly from month to month. The Census Bureau uses monthly inflation figures to adjust the numbers so that they are comparable, i.e., as if they were all taken in a single month in 2007.
3. According to the official ACS definitions, [a] household includes all the people who occupy a housing unit, while [a] family consists of a householder and one or more other people living in the same household who are related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption. In general the number of families will be less than the number of households: Not all households contain families since a household may be comprised of a group of unrelated people or of one person living alone — these are called nonfamily households. Thus, for example, in the 2007 ACS data Howard County is estimated as having 98,866 households but only 73,765 families.

For those Mozilla folks and others who’ve been following my full blog feed: I happen to live in Howard County, Maryland, between Washington DC and Baltimore.For a while now I’ve been following Howard County local bloggers but haven’t joined the conversation myself. I’ve now been prompted to write on at least one Howard County topic, and in the event I write more I’ve started a Howard County category for my blog and a corresponding feed. If you’re not interested in this stuff I suggest you consider resubscribing to just my Mozilla feed.