→ March 3, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

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→ November 30, 2012
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Hawai’i eats.

I’ve got posts up for Insiders on the Hanson-Walden trade and the Span-Meyer trade, and did a Klawchat yesterday as well.

I’d never set foot in Hawai’i before our vacation there last week, so we spent a lot of time getting oriented and didn’t really start nailing the culinary tourism until the fourth or fifth day there, after which point I found a bunch of spots worth recommending. I’ll get to the food in a moment, but first some quick thoughts on touring Kauai and Oahu in general:

* Kauai was gorgeous; we spent five days there at the Marriott Beach Club in Lihue (everything was via Rewards Points), which has a great pool, including a kiddie pool with a slide, and a beach on a large, calm lagoon. The rooms were nothing special at all, and the food all over the hotel was overpriced. The biggest lesson for us was that it was worthwhile to rent a car at least for a day or two – we drove to Waimea Canyon, also called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific; and Kalalau Point, which overlooks the Napali coast and the northwest shore of the island. The car also allowed us to tour the Kauai Coffee plantation, visit the Koloa Rum Company (and buy a bottle of their dark – pricey at $30, but smooth with a bright vanilla finish), and do a little more shopping.

* The big shocker on Oahu was the traffic – I can see why there’s a local push for a light-rail line into the western suburbs, because traffic on I-H1 (an “interstate” highway) is pretty brutal, and there seemed to be no enforcement of HOV lane restrictions. We stayed out at Ko Olina, so the car was a necessity, and also drove to Sea Life Park so my wife could swim with a dolphin, which was a longtime wish of hers. I can understand people who skip Oahu entirely and fly straight to Maui or Kauai, though – the scenic parts of Oahu are a hike from Honolulu.

I’ve got two food spots to recommend on Oahu, plus one that’s great if you’re up for the price. The Whole Ox Deli isn’t actually a deli but is more of a lunch counter with picnic tables, and reminded me in many ways of our favorite Arizona haunt, The Hillside Spot, for the focus on sourcing local ingredients and making everything from scratch. The Whole Ox got its start via Kickstarter, which raised funds for a smoker that they use to smoke pork shoulder for their pulled pork sandwich, although I ended up getting the porchetta sandwich with cracklins, mustardy mayo, and caramelized fennel, everything in perfect balance on a soft baguette. The fried potatoes are like grown-up french fires, skin-on red potatoes halved or quartered, either steamed or parboiled (I assume) and then fried till brown and crispy all over. This was absolutely worth fighting our way into downtown Honolulu to visit.

So was Downtown Coffee, which is located in the Fort Street Mall, a tiny shop run by a husband-and-wife team who roast their coffees every Saturday and sell a handful of artisan pastries including a matcha torte with bamboo charcoal crust that defied any expectation I’d had – it’s sweet but subtle, without the bitter grassy taste I associate with matcha. As for the coffee, I had a cup of their downtown blend and liked it enough to buy a 7 ounce bag of their beans to try at home as espresso, as well as a smaller bag of their lighter Maui Mokka peaberry roast, on the owner’s suggestion. He was kind enough to spend about 10-15 minutes walking me through all their roasts, showing me samples of five different ones to discuss their qualities for espresso, and even gave me a sample of another drip coffee for comparison’s sake. I’ve already finished off the Maui Mokka, which produced a very smooth shot with a strong crema, a little less assertively acidic than the lighter African roasts I’ve gotten from Intelligentsia.

The one pricey meal we had on Oahu was the result of me being a company man and visiting Disney’s Aulani resort to try their dinner buffet at Makahiki. The resort is gorgeous inside, reminiscent in style of Disney’s Polynesian Resort but more updated with more open space inside. I generally avoid buffets, with two exceptions – Las Vegas and Disney, where the quality is higher and the turnover is faster. Makahiki’s buffet was very broad, with a raw fish table that included poke, sashimi, and oysters on the half-shell; cooked shellfish, including red snow crab legs; a wide selection of meat and vegetable dishes, including Hawaiian purple sweet potatoes both steamed and fried tempura-style; and a dessert table that had molten chocolate cakes that were more molten than cake, making it a great dipping sauce for the fresh berries on the next table. For a buffet, it was great. It also runs $46 per adult and $21 per child, so even with my employee discount we still dropped over $100, including two drinks and tip. They did have a full selection of local beers from Kona, including the Big Wave Golden Ale which had a very pronounced citrus flavor and virtually no bitterness.

Moving over to Kauai, the best meal option at the Marriott is the overpriced Duke’s, which earns raves for a salad bar that is really just a nice salad bar. Their fish was very fresh, and I liked their basmati rice pilaf, but the “hula pie” dessert is incredibly overrated, probably more famous for its size than its taste. We fared much better heading across Rice St to the Feral Pig, a fairly new spot with no ambience but amazing food, including house-smoked bacon and pulled pork and a solid selection of local beers as well. They hand-cut their French fries and incorporate pork belly into a number of dishes, including two specials I ordered – the potstickers, made by hand and fried just until hot through without drying the pork out, and the special burger with half Kauai-raised beef and half pork belly as well as bacon on top. I asked how they cured the bacon, and the owner said he used a recipe from one of Michael Ruhlman’s books, although they don’t use sodium nitrite, so the bacon is grey rather than pink and has a porkier flavor. Everything was excellent and it was about half of what we’d pay for inferior food at the hotel.

Lappert’s is a local ice cream chain with four locations on Kauai and two on other islands. Try the Kauai Pie, Kona coffee ice cream with fudge swirl, coconut flakes, and macadamia nuts. I never tried another flavor because why bother. Next to the Lappert’s in Hanapepe is a new-ish looking taco stand called Paco’s Tacos, which makes outstanding carnitas, slow-cooked but crispy on the outside, probably deep-fried once it’s done cooking but so, so good. The only disappointment was the guacamole, made fresh but lacking salt and acid for me. It’s a good one-two combo if you remember to save room for ice cream.

I had an interesting twist on poke at the Hanalei Dolphin restaurant in Hanalei, down towards Poipu, near a shop my wife wanted to visit. Two kinds of raw fish (one was ahi) and some cooked prawns were tossed in a coconut-lemongrass sauce that threatened to overpower the fish but never quite got there, served over a bed of mixed greens with some root-vegetable chips on the side (taro and purple sweet potato, I think) if you’d rather not use a fork. I only had poke three times on the trip, never at a truly local spot like a good fish market, so I can only say that this had the best overall flavor but I can’t speak to its authenticity.

My final recommendation is the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Kauai Community College, right near Lihue and next door to the Koloa Rum Company. The fresh fruit there was out of sight – large, juicy starfruits with orange flesh and a subtle sweet-citrus flavor; papayas with reddish-orange flesh that were also bursting with sugar; plus huge jackfruits, apple bananas, pineapple, and more than we could hope to try. We did buy some butterscotch roasted macadamia nuts from the Kauai Nut Roasters and jams from Monkeypod, but had to pass on the desserts offered by one vendor whose name I can’t find – she had a lilikoi (passion fruit) custard that was absolutely incredible but would have spoiled in the car since we were headed out to the Canyon.

One more note – several readers recommended a noodle shop called Hamura Saimin in downtown Lihue, but after talking to several locals, I passed. Every person I asked said the shop uses too much MSG in their broth, and that the place isn’t very clean, which is about the one non-food-related variable that I care about when deciding where to eat. I also read a few reviews that mentioned the use of a Spam knockoff in some of their soups, and I won’t touch that stuff, even if it is a local tradition. Meat doesn’t come from cans.

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→ August 21, 2012
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Chicago eats.

I wrote about Bryce Harper’s struggles today for Insiders, and about Twins prospects Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario yesterday. My post on Saturday’s Under Armour game should go up in the next 24 hours.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my photograph of 2 Sparrows‘ maple bacon donut, which is on the short list of the best things I’ve ever eaten, not just for the bacon, but for the absolutely perfect donut at the heart of the $4 dish. The maple glaze is very sweet, like pure maple sugar, so the donut beneath it has little to no sweetness of its own, instead shining for the crispy exterior and a soft, light interior. The bacon crumbled over the top is house-cured, with the salt well balanced with the glaze’s sweetness, and some texture contrast with the soft donut. I admit the plate seemed a little gimmicky, but the execution across the board is tremendous.

The duck confit hash was less successful, however, primarily because of texture – every item in the hash, which is mostly duck and sweet potatoes, is soft, with the duck actually the least so, even slightly tough in comparison to everything else in the dish. I also find duck meat in general and confit in particular slightly sweet, at least relative to any other protein, so the combination with sweet potatoes felt unbalanced.

My dinner with Old Hoss Radbourn on Saturday night was also a huge hit, as we went to The Purple Pig, a restaurant that promises “cheese, swine, and wine.” We went heavy on the swine, going for pork liver paté, fried pig ears, and the “JLT,” with pig jowl standing in for the bacon – as well as two vegetable dishes and dessert. Dish by dish:

* The pork liver paté was unreal – as smooth as a dessert mousse, with a pronounced smoky undertone and a thin layer of high-quality olive oil on top, served with thick slices of grilled country bread. The server even brought more bread so we could finish every last bit of the paté, and even though I’m not even a huge fan of liver, I’d order this again in a heartbeat. The dish is one of a handful of “smears” they offer, including one made from lardo, cured pork fat that melts into whatever hot item is underneath it.

* I would never have guessed I was eating fried pig ears if I didn’t know going in what we had ordered. They’re slow-cooked, julienned, then quickly fried like french-fried onion rings, served with fried kale, pickled cherry peppers, and a fried egg on top. The pig ears have just a hint of tooth to them, but aren’t tough, and the frying makes the kale crispy while setting its deep green hue. It’s like the perfect bar snack for food snobs like me – and with a Belhaven stout in front of me I had no trouble finishing my half of the dish. You can find the recipe if you want to try this at home.

* The JLT was incredibly awkward to eat, but when I could get all the flavors into one bite, it was masterful, with huge flavors all in perfect balance. The jowl is the pig’s cheek meat, cured like bacon but thicker and much more tender; those of you familiar with regional Italian cooking may have had it as guanciale. The heirloom tomatoes are sliced nearly an inch thick, which contributed to the construction issues, although they were extremely bright and provided the one sweet element in the dish. The duck egg … perhaps I’m a philistine, but I doubt I could have identified this as a duck egg rather than a chicken egg, and either way, a runny egg makes every dish better. The lemon aioli tasted more like a cold bearnaise sauce, providing the one acidic element, while frisee adds a slightly bitter note. As a whole, the dish has a complex mixture of colors, textures, and flavors, and if it was a little easier to eat it would have scored an 80 for me.

* The broccoli with roasted garlic and anchovy vinaigrette was another winner, with the broccoli also roasted and the umami-filled vinaigrette coating the vegetables (florets and I believe julienned stalks) perfectly, but without the fishy taste the description might lead you to expect. The charred cauliflower with toasted breadcrumbs, cornichons, and parsley was our least favorite of the five dishes, even though it might have been the prettiest thanks to the use of green and purple florets; the flavors were all muted and compared to the strong flavors in every other dish it felt bland.

* Both desserts were excellent; the mixed berry crostada had a textbook flaky/tender crust that could have stood on its own, while the salted caramel soft-serve ice cream was very smooth and had the complexity you expect from that flavor, even if it’s become a little hackneyed at this point. I’d take the crostada over the ice cream just because it was more unusual. Good call by Hoss on this place, especially since I figured there was even money we’d end up at a brothel.

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→ May 26, 2012
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Ludivine in Oklahoma City + the Saturday five.

I was only in Oklahoma City for about 36 hours, as everything that could have gone wrong for me on Wednesday did, but I at least salvaged the day with an outstanding experience at Ludivine, a farm-to-table restaurant in downtown OKC.

Ludivine’s menu changes daily depending on what ingredients they’ve acquired, with everything except seafood and a few cheeses sourced locally. The dishes are highly creative in the way they layer flavors and use ingredients in unconventional ways, such as the rabbit liver vinaigrette on my salad, or the blueberry thyme bread pudding served with the crispy sweetbread (which I didn’t try).

I started with a charcuterie plate – they make most of it in-house, and I spotted Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie on their bookshelf – including their pork rillette, duck speck, and house-cured salmon. The rillette was very tender, held together with bacon fat, but a little underseasoned for me, so it needed help from the whole-grain mustard and homemade pickles provided on the plate. The paper-thin salmon needed nothing else, not even the hit of acid I usually crave when I eat cured or smoked salmon, among the best dishes of its kind I’ve had. Speck is a smoked product usually made from the pig’s hind leg or thigh, like prosciutto, but Ludivine uses duck breast instead; the resulting product was salty and very smoky, pairing well with the blackberry-tarragon “marmalade” also provided on the platter but too strong to eat on its own. (Nitpick: It’s not marmalade without citrus rind, unless we’re speaking a language other than English.)

The aforementioned salad had the freshest mustard greens and arugula I’ve ever had from any place other than my own gardens – they defined the color “green” – as well as half-inch wide lardons (chunks of bacon) that had been quickly fried to crisp them up and a generous shaving of grana Padano cheese (Parmiggiano-Reggiano that was made in the Padua region, so it must go by another name). The rabbit-liver dressing had a peculiar texture, not grainy, almost muddy, but it may have simply stood out because I’d never had a dressing like it before. The flavor was very subtle, and next to the bacon, cheese, and two peppery greens, the vinaigrette was just a background note.

I went with another starter rather than a full entree, trying bone marrow for the first time – which means I have nothing to which to compare the dish. The marrow bone was cut in half the long way, roasted to brown the top but leave the interior pink, and served with more whole-grain mustard and a lightly pickled shallot; the marrow meat was luxuriously soft, obviously fatty, but bright and mild in flavor, more like a fresh butter than a heavy meat. I have no idea if this was a great marrow dish or not, however, only that I enjoyed it.

For dessert, the salted caramel crème brulee was tempting, but even I have my limits when it comes to saturated fat, and went instead for the fresh strawberries (lightly sugared) and blueberries … served in fresh cream, of course. The strawberries were good, but the blueberries were perfect, and that cream was a reminder that the stuff we get in paper cartons in the store is a mere facsimile of the genuine article. (Organic Valley’s pasture-raised cream comes fairly close, though.)

I’ll give Ludivine bonus points for that bookshelf as well, since it also included The Flavor Bible and my friend Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I felt like my own cookbook collection was partially validated.

Total cost of the meal was around $50 including tip but no drink (I was too tired for alcohol), well worth it between the meal and the chance to support the local food industry. This is real food, sourced right and prepared right.

—

To the links…

A WSJ piece on the rising use of “spent grains,”, the solid matter left over during the brewing process after the wort is strained. They apparently make excellent bread.

From the New York Times, a mini-memoir piece called “All I Wanted Was for Alice Waters to Feed Me,” excerpted from author Daniel Duane’s new cooking memoir.

Slate’s Josh Levin argues (correctly) that colleges shouldn’t be allowed to yank athletic scholarships.

TIME‘s Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and one of the two minds behind their top 100 novels list in 2005, argues that genre fiction is disruptive technology, in an essay of which I think Jasper Fforde would approve. Indeed, Wilkie Collins was among the earliest practicioners of what is now called genre fiction, and his mentor was none other than Charles Dickens.

Should a university – or anyone, for that matter – be allowed to patent a cut of steak? Obviously not, although I find it more galling that a public university is trying to do it. Then again, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been busy approving nonsense patents for about fifteen years, so I’m not optimistic that they’ll reject this one.

Bonus link, from my friend Rene Saggiadi: ten “Italian” food facts that aren’t authentically Italian. I didn’t know about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, but we also didn’t have that tradition in my family.

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→ April 26, 2012
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Husk, Vin Rouge, Customshop.

Today’s Klawchat transcript, and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

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Husk, located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was named the best new restaurant in the country for 2011 by Bon Appetit magazine, just the best of a host of accolades earned by chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s). I had lunch at Husk, which isn’t the full experience (with a very different menu from what they serve for dinner), but loved their local-seasonal-artisanal approach to traditional southern cuisine.

Husk has a giant blackboard right by the podium showing where the restaurant obtained all of its main ingredients, from proteins to dairy to eggs, with most sources quite local, in either South or North Carolina. I overordered a little, but rational portion sizes meant I didn’t end up with a ton of food left over. The catfish, lightly dusted with cornmeal and quickly panfried, served over a broth of tomatoes, several beans (including lima beans), and pea shoots, was superb, easily the best catfish I’ve ever eaten, with none of the ‘fishy’ flavor most people would associate with that fish, instead playing up what a mild, slightly sweet-tasting fish it can be when sourced properly. The skillet of bacon cornbread was also superb, rich, crispy on the bottom from the skillet and the bacon fat, with flecks of bacon throughout; this may have been gauche, but I found it quite useful for dipping in the tomato broth underneath the fish. For dessert, Husk had a special item, a blueberry crisp with local berries, a very thin layer of buckwheat granola on top, and a quenelle of lemon ice cream; overall the dish was far less sweet than most desserts, with a tangy/sweet combination that kept the blueberries at the center of the dish.

Service overall was very attentive, if a little peculiar. When I told the server it was my first time at the restaurant and asked for her recommendations, she actually recommended the cheeseburger, saying it was “the best thing on the menu.” That may be true, but is that really what I’m here for? I’ll get a burger at a great burger place. I went to Husk for the chef’s innovations in southern food. And I hope eventually to get back there for dinner, preferably with a few months’ notice so I can actually get a reservation.

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A few weeks back, I had a postgame meal in Durham at Vin Rouge, another discovery from Bon Appetit because the restaurant had participated in a charity dinner in Raleigh that was covered by the magazine. I tweeted at the time that their bacon confiture – a bacon, onion, brown sugar confection served with thick slices of country bread – was on the short list of the best things I have ever eaten, and I admit I haven’t stopped thinking about the dish since then. It overshadowed the meal itself, trout amandine that was slightly overcooked in the kitchen and became very overcooked on its way to me because the trout – the whole fish, or about two meals for me – was still folded in half and thus continued to steam itself until I opened it up. The mashed potatoes on the plate, however, were divine, with God-knows-how-much cream/butter and a perfectly smooth texture. As a wine bistro, Vin Rouge doesn’t have much of a beer selection, which isn’t so much a complaint (did I expect anything different) as a comment for those of you who, like me, prefer barley to grapes. I will return, just with a different choice of entree.

–

Kiley McDaniel and I went to Charlotte’s Customshop last night at the suggestion of a reader (I apologize, I don’t remember who passed it along). Their concept is great – local sourcing, in-house preparations (such as duck- and chicken-liver pate) – but the execution wasn’t there last night. The braised pork belly had great color on the exterior and the ale and cider reduction was a perfect complement, but the meat was tough and some of the edges of the belly were actually charred. The roasted half-duck special had a crispy skin dusted with Chinese five-spice powder, but again, the meat was overcooked and tough, refusing to separate from the bones. They have a solid selection of charcuterie items – we went with Speck, Manchego (with honey), and drunken goat (with quince paste) – and the bread pudding (with sliced apples and caramel sauce, albeit with some over-roasted walnuts) was generally strong. With ingredients this good, the finished product felt more disappointing for the lack of execution because it could have been phenomenal with a more deft hand.

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→ March 30, 2012
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Citizen Public House + more Scottsdale eats.

Citizen Public House in Scottsdale was on Phoenix magazine’s list of the 23 best new restaurants of 2011; this was my seventh so far, although two of the ones I’d visited previously have since closed. This dinner was the best meal I’ve had at any Arizona restaurant other than Pizzeria Bianco, a fine dining-meets-gastropub menu that’s heavy on bacon fat and other comfort-food staples.

We started with the pork belly pastrami ($12), probably their best-known dish, a small portion of melt-in-your-mouth pork belly with an exterior bark served over browned rye spaetzle with a Brussels sprout slaw and a whole-grain mustard vinaigrette. The meat is tender, the fat smooth and warm, and the zing of the mustard helped balance the richness of the meat. It was difficult to get all of the ingredients in one bite, but the hint of sweetness in the spice rub married well with the acidity of the vinaigrette and the faint bitterness of the cabbage. The bacon-fat popcorn ($5) is as you’d imagine – freshly-popped popcorn tossed in bacon fat with crispy pieces of bacon mixed in; there was a lot of fat at the bottom of the bowl but the popcorn itself wasn’t greasy.

The seared sea scallops ($24) over creamy grits were probably a bit past medium-rare but the sear was perfect and brought out the scallops’ inherent sweetness; they’re not my favorite kind of shellfish (that would be crab), but since this is another signature dish I felt compelled to try it, and actually liked the grits – more like the softest polenta imaginable, but made with white corn grits and whole corn rather than yellow cornmeal, creamy but not overly cheesy to the point where they might overshadow the scallops. The dish was topped with more crispy bacon bits, which are always welcome, and there was a superfluous Coca-Cola gastrique around the edges of the plate. My friend got the fair-trade short rib ($28), cut flanken-style, braised and browned (my preferred style) with a dried cherry sauce (barely necessary) and served over mashed parsnips

The chocolate pecan bars were a little sweet for me, with the texture of fudge and a salted caramel sauce on top, but if you like fudgy brownies this would likely be right up your alley, and the chicory ice cream that comes with it does give an earthy component to balance out the sticky-sweet flavor and texture of the bars. The beer selection only includes one local beer on draft (Four Peaks’ hefeweizen, which isn’t even one of their top two brews); the cocktail menu is heavy on old-school ingredients like gin and rye but in more contemporary concotions.

* Scratch Pastries on Indian School supposedly has the best macarons in town, but after one look at them – wide and flat, as if they’d spread badly in the oven – I decided to stick with a sandwich, which was on some of the best bread I’ve had out here. The smoked duck breast sandwich comes with walnuts, mixed greens, and olive oil, which sounded like it might be too simple but instead keeps the duck – smoky and tender but not fatty – at center stage. The sandwich came with a side salad for $8, an absolute steal given the quality of the ingredients, making it all the more horrifying that someone might choose one of the million fast-food options in that area to save a buck or two (if that).

* Echo Coffee is between Old Town and Papago Park (where the A’s minor league complex is, as well as the Phoenix Zoo) and rivals Cartel Coffee Lab for the best drip coffee in town. Echo grinds the beans to order, sitting them in a cone filter and pouring just-boiled water over the top, so it brews as you watch. Yes, it’s a $2 cup of coffee, but this is what real coffee tastes like, full of subtle notes that are lost when the coffee is overroasted (I’m looking at you, Peet’s) or blended to eliminate any kind of character (the very definition of Starbucks’ Pike Place blend). It’s too far from the house for me to go there just for a cup of coffee, but it’s good enough that I would reroute myself to go by there if I was otherwise headed into Phoenix or Scottsdale.

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