Thanksgiving is a distant memory, Christmas is done, and the holiday season — in all its shlocky glitz and sweetness — is nearly over. All that’s left to do is bid a final farewell to the year gone by, to turn our backs on the little victories and larger defeats…
When I was young, Christmas in the Sheehan household was a fairly predictable event. It began about 4 a.m., or whatever godawful hour my brother Brendan and I would drag our parents out of bed for our annual living-room reenactment of the battle of Thermopylae, with Mom and Dad playing…
Larry Herz is happy. Walking the floor of Go Fish Grille on a Saturday night, he’s in his element — an industry veteran working a crowded house — and he’s got an energy that arcs off him like sparks. He moves between tables, chatting, checking up, floating, dodging. He back-pedals…
Finally, I feel like a true Coloradan. I’ve eaten at the Brown Palace. I’ve eaten at Casa Bonita (and lived to tell about it). And now I’ve eaten at The Fort. That’s the goddamn trifecta, isn’t it? So where do I get me one of them “Native” bumperstickers? When do…
Reporter, huh?” Fred said, looking entirely uninterested. “Like, you work for the newspaper?” “Yeah,” I said, looking down at the Vesuvius of cigarette butts in the ashtray, the half-eaten cheeseburger and cold coffee in front of me, thinking how working was the last thing I was doing. “Something like that.”…
It’s an embarrassment, the amount of instant ramen noodle soup in my cupboard right now, from a variety of companies (Nissin, Maruchan, some off-brand called Ninja), in several preparations (both the cup and the brick, as well as a microwavable bowl) and a spread of flavors that all taste exactly…
For nearly half my life, I watched no TV. When I tell people that, a squint of fundamental distrust screws up their faces, and they look at me like I’ve got lobsters crawling out of my ears. They always treat me differently afterward — as though I’ve just admitted to…
It must be weird when fame pays off, when you’re not just recognized for what you do well, but when that recognition translates into the kind of fast return that usually only comes in movies. There’s that scene of the Beatles in their hotel room, tumbling all over each other…
I never thought Mirepoix would make it. I didn’t believe that Bryan Moscatello and crew could squeeze Adega’s smart, beautiful cuisine into a JW Marriott corporate template; I kept seeing all that lovely food dying under the domes of room-service trays. And the fact that they were trading on the…
Phil Collier, owner and executive chef of A La Tomate Cafe and Tarterie, is a nervous sort of fella. I can see him in the kitchen — a big space for such a small place, full of tall bakery racks, new ovens, antique slicers with exposed motors, bright stainless steel…
Wild-mushroom-and-Fontina grilled cheese. Frittatas; toasted-oat pancakes that taste like giant oatmeal raisin cookies laced with wispy vanilla; seared tuna in a soy-ginger glaze. Eggs Benedict made with poached eggs wrapped in smoky Nova lox and topped with crème fraîche, and a breakfast pizza assembled from scrambled eggs, beef tenderloin, sprigged…
Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, but three times? Three times is the beginning of an addiction, and for the Bush administration, Heaven Dragon Chinese Cuisine and Lounge is starting to look like an unhealthy habit. It was back in 2002 that President George W. Bush got his…
One of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the country, Dac Hoa, is in Rochester, New York. It’s a small, Barton Fink-ish place, with a perpetual pall of dishwater gray light, rickety tables and peeling everything in a borderline-creepy neighborhood. Still, most people who eat there have no idea how good…
The International House of Pancakes seemed like the obvious choice for breakfast. I had friends in town — non-foodie friends who couldn’t pick a head of endive out of a lineup even if I spotted them three food groups — and the IHOP was walking distance from their hotel. We…
I saw successively imprinted on every face the glow of desire, the ecstasy of enjoyment, and the perfect calm of utter bliss. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste It was the strangest sort of party, uncomfortably intimate and cheerful for no reason at all. This was 1994, maybe…
I stopped by on a whim, at about five-thirty in the afternoon, drawn in by both the action and the tickle on my internal culinary Geiger counter. Regardless of what the clock said, I wanted lunch, since I’d slept really late and already had two dinners scheduled for that night…
It’s the simplest thing, and it’s almost universally overlooked in the fast-paced, big-business kitchens of the world. There it’s a throwaway, a gimme course, with the duty of making it generally given over to the lowest guy on the galley totem pole. The soup. The free bread on the table…
We’d both woken up mad, the wife and I. Rolled out of bed pissed off, brushed our teeth pissed off, then gotten dressed pissed off, each under our own cloud of bad feelings and faulty neurochemistry. Wisely, we tried to avoid each other, to keep our two clouds from bumping…
It was a knee-jerk New Yorker’s reflex that led me to Famous Pizza. Make that Famous Pizza #1. “The Original Famous Pizza,” as spelled out on the front window and the menu. Opened by Gus Mavrocefalos in 1974, this joint has been operating out of its crooked storefront for thirty…
What’s that?” asks the young Vietnamese guy sitting at the table across from mine. He brings his hands together, palms touching, then opens them — miming the book I have in one hand. I raise it up off the table and show him the cover — it’s my well-thumbed copy…
The kitchen at Zengo is a mess, a riot of white jackets, ice and fire. I count six, eight, maybe as many as ten cooks bouncing, spinning in place, shuffling plates and pans and sheet trays; hear raised voices — no particular words, just the sharp cadence of a chef…
My buddy Gracie and I have this map — a U.S. highway diagram torn from the front of an old Rand McNally atlas, showing all of the major interstate routes spooling out across the fruited plain. From I-95’s start in Florida’s malarial salt bogs to the terminus of I-90 in…
