We were seated around a formidable wooden table — the same one where we gathered to dissect our own stories and attempted to sniff out what we were doing wrong, and what (if anything) we were doing right.
In the staff member's words, Obama can see all sides of an issue, whereas Clinton would be formidable across the negotiating table from, say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In the front, on the other side of an opaque glass wall, is a barroom with more tightly packed tables, a formidable din and a longer menu of simpler dishes — like a $12 tarte flambée and a $12 mash of lamb, conch and tripe — that borrow more directly from the Alsatian background of the restaurant's chef, Gabriel Kreuther.
"Design is what matters to me," not décor or decoration, said the decorator, whose eclectic tastes (Napoleon III chairs paired with Martin Szekely woven steel consoles; Ron Arad chairs with side tables by the formidable French decorator Madeleine Castaing) have been influential enough that a coffee table book was inevitable.
Of course, Louis's appetites -- in bed and at the table -- were formidable.
For both sides in Vienna, the adversaries back home may prove more formidable than those across the table.
After a birthday cake and a chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", Feldman leaned his formidable frame across the dinner table like a prosecutor, pressing Klingberg: "Come on Marek [his preferred Polish version of Marcus], what is it you know that you don't know that you know?
They head straight to the dimly lighted back room, there to hone their formidable skills at the nine pool tables and the snooker table in the corner.
Two small banks that have sprung up in recent years have climbed to formidable positions in the league tables.
Mr Sarkozy brings formidable energy and creative ideas to the diplomatic dinner table.
