The original New York Pizzeria on Leetsdale Boulevard — huddled among the liquor stores, taquerías and liquor stores — was a classic hole-in-the-wall. Seating was scant and the tile floors powdered with flour; orders were taken, processed and served at the wall-to-wall counter; and always hanging in the air was…
Sometimes these weekly missives are about time and the progression through it of a menu, a chef, an address. Sometimes they’re about history, which isn’t the same as time, because time is smooth and steady, and history is, well, bumpy. History is the story of peaks and jags in time,…
I checked out Buenos Aires Grill (see “Grill of My Dreams,” September 21) again on Wednesday — this time for lunch, which I’d somehow missed during my first whirlwind tour through owner Francis Carrera’s beautifully appointed Argentine fine- dining restaurant. And while almost everything I loved at dinner (bacalao and…
For a long time, restaurants have played a cruel game with diners, vacillating wildly between opposing schools of menu-writing theory. On one side are menus that seem compelled to describe in loving, verdant detail not only the basic ingredients in every dish, but the provenance of each ingredient — where…
The guys behind the counter got my order wrong three times — but from past experience eating at the Taste of Philly on Colorado Boulevard in recent months, I knew that three attempts was about average for getting the correct order in the correct bag. The wait gave me plenty…
The kitchen had done an okay job cooking the fried chicken — but it had also slipped in some ginger, which I didn’t appreciate. Yes, the ginger had been mentioned on the menu, but not emphasized. At least, not enough. There should’ve been more warning. The menu description should have…
With my review of Steuben’s now off the stands (read the October 5 “American Idyll” here) and all questions of owner Josh Wolkon’s American obsessions and searches for provenance and origin answered, we can get down to the truly important matter raised by his menu: namely, where is the best…
Location, location, location, my ass. For decades, Szechuan Chinese Restaurant has been doing business in one of the worst imaginable locations in all of restaurantdom, holding down a chunky, L-shaped space folded into the elbow of a nearly inaccessible strip mall off a one-way frontage road running beneath and beside…
Four years ago, I had one of the greatest, strangest, most affecting meals of my life at Ocean City. It was during the Chinese lunar festival, and the party went on for hours with more courses than I can remember. I ate cold pig’s-ear salad, whole abalone in oyster gravy,…
Two weeks ago in Bite Me, I wrote about Kyoto, the new-old restaurant being reopened by Duy Pham and partner James Lee at 7301 South Santa Fe Drive in Littleton. Now it’s official: The place will close on Sunday, October 15, and then, after a five-day whirlwind of cleaning, repair…
As an achievement in design, Steuben’s is unparalleled. No hackneyed, cliched or sardonic architectural detail was spared in the construction of this physical love letter to a time not too long gone when wood-veneer paneling and vinyl-covered steel-tube chairs were the height of de mode fashion. Every angle in the…
While Steuben’s (see review) has that whole American regional thing going, scores of other restaurants focus on foods of even more precise regional specificity. Corn Belt picnic cuisine? Done. Japanese mountain peasant food and North Vietnamese party grub? Done and done. And when Frasca first opened, it swore by the…
As we pull into the parking lot, I see the sign for live entertainment, Saturdays from nine until one in the morning. I find live music in a restaurant distracting, and say so as if after the years we’ve spent together — nearly all of them described by the arcs…
I miss Mee Yee Lin — the old Mee Yee Lin on West Alameda Avenue, the little dim sum place where I first ate crispy fried intestine, where I could linger over a late lunch in a homey American cafe as envisioned by a transplanted Chinese family. But that Mee…
After dark, this stretch of 22nd Street can be rough. The sidewalks are unlit, every open space is a parking lot, and the storefronts are shattered, boarded up. On the walls, the tags run together like tribal voodoo — less artistic than furtive, a secret language spelled out in whispers…
The worst thing about barbecue is waiting for it. I hit Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Q during a shift change last week, and I had to wait fifteen whole minutes — which is about fourteen whole minutes longer than I’m comfortable waiting for anything. I have what you might call an impulse-control…
There’s one thing you’ll never want for at Ocean: service. On a Thursday night, dozens of bodies are on the floor — servers and bussers and runners in pale-blue chambray and black, captains in shirts and silk ties, managers of every description. Three tenders and a barback in the pit…
From the outside, Pesce Fresco looks like just another strip-mall Italian joint shoved between nail salons and auto-parts stores. Even inside, it looks like so many similarly themed, similarly imagined restaurants: mustard-yellow walls and dark upholstery comforting in their commonness; reproduction Taittinger prints and posters advertising things that once were…
As if I don’t already have enough chef Troy Guard/Sullivan Group stuff kicking around in print, here’s another tidbit. In a recent conversation, spin mistress Leigh Sullivan let it slip that she’d just been on the phone checking on dance lessons for Troy, her husband.. “Seriously? Dance lessons? What for?”…
Word came down from Washington, D.C., last week: No more horse slaughterhouses in the United States. To which most people responded, “Are there horse slaughterhouses in the United States?” Yes, there are. Three of them. All owned by foreign companies that are slaughtering tens of thousands of horses a year…
Life is full of small pleasures and little joys. Sometimes, they’re all you get. The bad stuff is big, often overwhelming, frequently spinning madly out of control. Focus on it and you’d think the whole universe is going to hell. What with wars and disasters, tragedies both personal and global,…
El Coyotito #3 (see review) is a real Mexican restaurant — all tacos and menudo, sopas de mariscos and sad accordion music on the juke. Lola, on the other hand, is a very fake Mexican restaurant that, in being fake, has earned the freedom to be so much more. In…
