In the beginning there was the hamburger, and it was good. Back at the dawn of American cuisine (I’m talking the ’30s — the goddamn Paleozoic Era, foodwise) there was the hamburger, and all things sprang forth from it. Sure, we had our Betty Crockers with their apple brown betties,…

People who say you can never have too much of a good thing just haven’t tried hard enough. It’s Saturday night — technically Sunday morning, but not by much — and I am lying on my back in the middle of my living room, all the lights out, with my…

Tip down!” And the people cheer. Servers, cooks, busboys, regulars — those in the know — send up a loud, brief shout. Sometimes it’s “Thank you!” Sometimes it’s just “Yeah!” — but they always do it. Every time someone pokes a few crumpled dollars into the little treasure box by…

For a restaurant, looks aren’t everything. Pretty is nice, no doubt. Pretty will get you places, but on its own, pretty ain’t enough. The business is tough and getting tougher. A lot of sharp young chefs and blooded, veteran operators out there are hungry for what little cash is flowing…

In fourteen syllables, the sign out front — a small thing, almost understated, the color of wet slate — manages to capture the kind of arrogance, the brash hubris, that would be celebrated in Los Angeles or Vegas with spotlights and names spelled out in hundred-foot-tall bonfires of neon. That’s…

We stepped outside, Laura and I, our arms loaded down with takeout boxes, protected by an invisible force field of fennel, anise, clove and curry smells that pushed back the gray ugliness of another suburban parking lot in another suburban strip mall. Before us were too many SUVs, greasy puddles…

What is patriotism but the love of good things we ate in our childhood?” wondered Lin Yutang. Lin, I’m guessing, was not thinking about fettuccine alfredo when he wrote that, but I am. I’m thinking about gloppy alfredo sauce out of a jar from the grocery store, the dim ghost…

There’s a method — rigorously tested and refined by my friend Andy, an old kitchen buddy — for determining the quality of a Mexican restaurant before you even sit down. It’s quick, scientific and nearly foolproof, and it simply calls for tallying the bullfighting paraphernalia on the walls. A single…

Remember Murphy Brown? I used to watch it a lot, because it was a show about reporters, and since I wanted to be a reporter someday, I considered that research. I didn’t know any actual journalists back then — the closest I came was a high school journalism teacher who…