Post-mortem meetings in business-speak / TUE 6-6-23 / Tomato sauce brand named for a famed restaurant in East Harlem / Pale lager informally / Bittersweet Italian liqueur / Ishii Lucy Liu's character in Kill Bill

Constructor: Daniel Jaret

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: rotational symmetry - rotate the puzzle 180 degrees and see the letters all in the same place (well, you have to turn them right-side up again, if you literally rotate it, but you get the idea)

Theme answers:

• all of them?

Word of the Day: RAO'S (52A: Tomato sauce brand named for a famed restaurant in East Harlem) —

Rao's (/ˈreɪoʊz/) is a Southern Italian restaurant founded in 1896. It is located at 455 East 114th Street, on the corner of Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, New York City. Rao's has sister restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nevada. // The restaurant was started in 1896 by Joshua Anthony Rao, who moved with his parents from Italy to the United States. He bought a small shop in Italian Harlem, once a very large Italian-American community, and ran the restaurant until his death in 1909. Louis Rao took over the business. He was seen by many as a very suave man.^{[citation needed]} He had his hair cut at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and wore many fancy suits.^{[citation needed]} (wikipedia) 

• • •

Here is the opening of my write-up of the NYTXW from December 23, 2008. I haven't changed a word, and I haven't changed my feelings:

Nearly every crossword puzzle grid has rotational symmetry with respect to the black and white squares. Today, it has rotational symmetry with respect to fill.

I wonder if anyone else was thinking, about halfway through the solving experience, "Why am I doing a crappy themeless puzzle on a Tuesday?"

So ... I look forward (read: absolutely do not look forward) to seeing another one of these "rotational symmetry" gems in ... [counts on fingers] ... 2038!? Wow. Let's just call that my unofficial Retirement Day, because once you've seen this theme *three* times, well, that probably means you've been writing about New York Times Crossword Puzzles long enough. OK, back to this puzzle. . . but not for long, because there's nothing to say. The only reason any of this [gestures broadly at 8 1/2 x 11 print-out of puzzle on desk] exists is because the letters are symmetrical. Content shmontent. Nothing is in the grid because it's fun or nice or cool or interesting. And you can tell you're going to be dealing with some terrible gimmick from the second you open the puzzle, because the grid looks amateurish, remedial, uninviting, with only the central answer clocking in at more than six letters. Who wants to solve a puzzle made entirely of short fill? Gruesome. And those cheater squares*—all those ridiculous extra black squares in the NW / SE corners—yikes. You'd never see those in a professionally made puzzle for grown-ups unless there was some reason the constructor was trying to make the grid very easy to fill. And there is a reason. It's just not a good reason. Also, as I say, this exact theme has been done before, under this editor's watch. Many of you won't have seen that one, and this one is *definitely* cleaner than the first one, but software's also gotten a lot better since then, so, again, all I can say is, who cares? And why? Why? 

I literally cut-and-pasted today's theme description from the 2008 puzzle. I feel like this puzzle doesn't deserve much more than a cut-and-paste write-up, but here's a little something: It was super-easy and yet somehow also a chore. It felt borderline insulting. Fill is either overfamiliar crosswordese or it's bizarre stuff like PILS (20A: Pale lager, informally), or an outlier proper noun like RAO'S (52A: Tomato sauce brand named for a famed restaurant in East Harlem—a debut today), or some horrid bit of "business-speak" (48D: Post-mortem meetings, in business-speak = RETROS). I imagine lots of people will be warmly disposed to this puzzle today solely because they broke their Tuesday speed record (by a mile?). My only real issues were with PILS and RAO'S (don't believe the former, never heard of the latter). Oh, I never even saw NO SIDE until just now, but never heard of that one either. Look, that's all I got. The puzzle gives me nothing, I got nothing to give. If the puzzle does its job next time, then you'll get a full write-up next time. Take care!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*cheater squares = black squares that do not add to the overall word count, usually added to make the grid easier to fill cleanly. They can be very useful, but are generally used sparingly / judiciously. Today, you can see them in a big clump, after DAP, before TATAS and before AMARO (and then again in symmetrical positions in the SE). There's also an unremarkable pair under DELS and above SLED.

P.S. LOL all the mad beer people in the comments. Look, if PILS were such a common term, we’d Definitely have seen it in crosswords by now. And yet, as with RAO’S…

P.P.S. On the other hand …

[my wife texted me this just now from the Price Chopper]

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