New York Times, Monday, May 6, 2019

Pret a Manger is my go-to lunch place when it's raining. It's on my block on 45th Street, and I can get there in about 20 steps, so I barely get wet. (I like the tuna and cucumber sandwich.) A few months ago as I left work, I saw the store sign across the street, and pronounced it to myself as "Manger" as in "Away in a Manger." I realized that ?ANGER can have three very different pronunciations, depending on what the first letter is. Before I was halfway to Penn Station, I had the theme, and I even figured I could put EYE coming down from the E of MANGER and cross the other E of EYE with RHYMES. In my head, while I was walking, that was in the lower right corner, but it didn't work out that way.

Another thing that didn't work out was using Margaret Sanger. A 14-letter answer can't go in the middle. I considered using Bernhard Langer (a German golfer who twice won the Masters) as a fourth theme answer, but I wasn't exactly sure if that didn't rhyme with "hanger," and given that his biggest win was 26 years ago, he's hardly a household name.

When submitting puzzles, I always include possible titles for when they are collected in books. My title for this one was "Looks Can Be Deceiving."

Great find, three mid-length words that look like they should rhyme, but don't. The technical term for that is EYE / RHYME. I hadn't heard of that phrase before doing crosswords, but it's no doubt descriptive.

There was a puzzle two years ago that played on all sorts of EYE RHYMEs. I liked that Peter went above and beyond today, finding not just pairs of longish EYE RHYMEs, but a trio.

It made me wonder, is there a quartet that would fit the bill? Anyone brighter than me out there?

(Clearly, yes. Peter reminded me of COUGH, TOUGH, BOUGH, DOUGH. Now, can anyone think of a set using all words of 6+ letters?)

As much as I enjoyed the trio today, it made for a thin-feeling theme. Phrases of length 11, 13, 11, that's it? Only 35 theme squares? Okay, there is the EYE / RHYME revealer, but the way it's broken up into two shorties, it doesn't feel like it adds to the theme density.

I generally am a strict symmetrist — no exceptions to the rule! (Okay, it's not as much a rule, as a norm.) But I'd have preferred something like Peter's last bending of the norm. In that one, TRIATHLON made the theme feel meatier (and the lack of symmetry surprisingly didn't bother me). Having EYE RHYME as one entry would have made it felt more like 11 + 13 + 11 + 8 = 43 theme squares, which is decent.

Tough grid for a Monday. I liked it, but it's not going to be anyone's gateway drug, not with entries like RESTIVE, NETHER, TRADE ON, PATOOT. Those are all fair game though, and along with the plethora of long bonuses in MERCUTIO, EDIT MENU, EPIDEMIC, ATTA GIRL, even PESTLE, FAKERY, SATIRES, it's colorful and fresh.

The theme is tricky enough — especially if you've never been to a PRET-A-MANGER, or if you've never heard the term EYE RHYME — and the grid so snazz-dense, that it's a great Tuesday or even Wednesday puzzle. Not one I'd give to a NYT newb, though.