Do you remember your first Chinese meal? Think back to your introduction to egg rolls and the virgin sting of soy sauce on your tongue. Did they feel like foreign foods to you then? Did the words wonton, chow mein and moo goo gai pan feel as strange in your…

So where’d you go for lunch?” I asked. “We ended up at El Taco de México — it’s got real Mexican Mexican food. You been there yet?” I shook my head. I’ve been eating like a pig since I came to town a few months ago, and despite the fact…

Not too long ago, going out to eat meant just that: leaving your house and going someplace where someone unrelated to you would do the cooking. It was a simple process, requiring nothing of the diner except an appetite and a wallet. You didn’t need to buy a new wardrobe,…

Over the years, I’ve been assembling a dream menu of the best foods I’ve ever eaten, a desert-island top ten from which I’d choose if ever asked the question, “If you could eat only one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?” Beef jerky…

All of you health nuts are going to feel pretty stupid someday, lying there in your hospital beds dying of nothing in particular. Redd Foxx said something like that once, and I agree with him. All you joggers, all you twig-and-berry vegans, all you juicers, you fasters, you calorie-counters and…

Gene Tang — the owner, floor manager and master sommelier of 1515 — knows how to work a room. One minute, he’s on the stairs, smiling all the way back to his eyeteeth and greeting the point man for a group of eight just making their way up from the…

The interior of Shead’s Fish and BBQ Heaven is not hip or slick or fabulous. Nor does it have that bogus clutter aesthetic or the faux-rustique feel so popular at some of the carefully sculpted eateries I’ve been skulking around these days. I can guarantee you that not a single…

Chefs acquire weight over time. I’m not talking about pounds packed on the beltline from nights spent surrounded by food, but rather a kind of metaphoric weight — a density of celebrity that increases incrementally with each mention of their names by critics and chowhounds, a slow accretion of notoriety…

When I first sat down at Maruti Narayan’s, the table was a blank canvas, holding only white plates and white napkins set against a white tablecloth. By the end of the meal, it was chaos, a full-color topographical portrait of the Indian subcontinent done entirely in shades of food. There…

In prison, they say the quickest way to gain respect among the general population is to pick the biggest, meanest, ugliest guy in your block and, on your first day inside, beat him to death with a chair. Sure, you’ll spend a few months in the hole, but this establishes…

The Oldsmobile Toronado is a monster of a car. Seventeen feet long and grossing nearly two tons, it’s an old-school blacktop heavyweight and, in its day, was one king-hell luxury ride. Although it never had the power of a Corvette or the raw muscle of those classic Mustangs, pound-for-pound, the…

It’s been almost two years since I’ve had decent Italian food. I’ve just recently come north from the culinary hinterlands of New Mexico, where a good red sauce is as hard to find as a cloudy day, a competent driver or a virgin bride. There were nights when I would…