→ March 17, 2019
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Florida eats, 2019 edition.

I reached out to readers before my trip last week to the Palm Beach area and got far more suggestions than I could try in just over 48 hours there before I drove north. There were two very big hits in my opinion, the first one the unassuming Mediterranean Market and Deli in West Palm Beach, which is indeed a market of foods from the Levant that also offers wraps and platters to go (there’s no seating) at absurd prices. The shish tawook platter (chicken marinated in lemon juice and turmeric) was really too much food – more than a serving’s worth of chicken, plus large portions of rice pilau and hummus, a thin pita (closer to lavash), and a small salad like a fattoush without the bread. The chicken was superb, bright, tart, and not overcooked (also not Nimmo-cooked), and, as silly as it might sound, the rice was also just delicious. White rice can be so bleh, but this not only had flavor (prepared in broth, perhaps?) but was perfectly cooked, and had strands of vermicelli pasta as is traditional in cuisines like that of Lebanon. The hummus was probably the least interesting part of the platter in part because it was too thin.

I met a friend for dinner at Grandview Market in West Palm Beach, a food hall – get used to that term in this post – with a slew of options for dinner and desserts, so I partook of both. We each got sandwiches from El Cochinito, which of course specializes in slow-roasted pork; I got their namesake sandwich, on crusty bread with maduros and some sliced onion. It’s also too much food, and almost too inexpensive at $10. The original El Cochinito is in LA on Sunset Blvd, between Night + Market Song and Intelligentsia Coffee. For dessert, I followed my friend’s tip to get the rolled ice cream at Crema, which has an intimidating array of combinations on the menu, so I asked the guy who took my order what he’d recommend to someone who likes chocolate, coffee, and mint ice creams. He didn’t hesitate to push the Cafecito, which has ground coffee mixed right into the ice cream with a fudge swirl and some graham crackers on the site. Those were kind of superfluous – maybe that would work better if they crumbled on top – but the ice cream itself was rich and tasted like a sweetened caffe latte.

Many people recommended Leftovers, part of a trio of local restaurants run by the same family, but my meal there was disappointing for a simple and entirely preventable reason: They didn’t salt the fish. I ordered what is apparently their signature dish, the fresh fish of your choice (I went with triple tail on my server’s suggestion) coated with julienned sweet potato and then pan-fried until crispy, served over a giant kitchen-sink of a salad. The problem is that the fish wasn’t seasoned at all beneath the coating – not just undersalted, but unsalted, and you can’t recover from that mistake. It felt like such a waste of a beautiful piece of fish, and the coating itself was delicious (crispier than I would have guessed, since sweet potatoes don’t fry up as well as white potatoes do), but even with the coating and a rich key-lime garlic sauce, the fish itself was still just bland. I also tried their fried tuna and basil roll – wrapped like an egg roll and deep fried, so the tuna ends up cooked as if it had been seared – which was interesting, mostly because of the wasabi dipping sauce, because the fish itself was kind of bland despite being of high quality.

Avocado Grill was another reader recommendation and had the advantage of being very close to the Nationals/Astros’ park, where I was headed on Saturday night but didn’t have a long window for dinner. (They have two locations; this was the one in Palm Beach Gardens.) I ordered a beet salad to start and fish tacos for my entrée, and both had the same issues: very good inputs, very little flavor. The salad had no dressing on it, and the fish was underseasoned itself so it relied on the other toppings, including a lime-ginger dressing and a fruit salsa, to give it any taste. Again, as with the Leftovers meal, someone here is buying the right ingredients, but the technique here is lacking.

I had coffee both mornings I was in the area at Subculture, which you can also get at the Nationals/Astros park; the pour-over coffee was fine, but I’d skip their espresso, which I thought was overextracted. I ordered a macchiato, my preference for espresso drinks, but it was just a double shot with some overfoamed milk spooned on top, not poured in so it integrates a little with the coffee.

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I did better in Orlando, fortunately. Hunger Street Tacos was the best place I visited, even with their beef-heavy menu. I went with the chicken and chorizo taco, the hibiscus and avocado taco, and the elote street corn (shaved off the cob, so it’s better for sharing). The chicken and chorizo was the better of the two, but the hibiscus taco was certainly the most unique I’ve ever tried: the flowers are shredded and sautéed, so they look like dark red cabbage but have a profile like that of sweet red wine – not quite as sweet as a port but in that vein. Their fresh limeade is not short on the lime juice, either.

Swine and Sons is a spinoff of local stalwarts The Ravenous Pig, having taken over a nearby storefront when they first opened before moving into one of two local food halls I visited on this trip, this one inside a Meat House that’s across a large Winter Park intersection from the Pig’s location. Their focus, as you might imagine, is pig, including house-made charcuterie, but I was there early for breakfast (served all day) and got the very simple “eggs on a bun” – fried eggs, house-made bacon, and tomato jam (cheese optional) on a very good bread. The bacon was the star, as you’d hope, and this was worth more than $7 when you consider the quality and craft behind it. They also offer chilaquiles and avocado toast as breakfast options, and their weekend breakfast menu is twice as big.

Se7en Bites offers to “fill your pie hole,” if you were unclear on their concept; this food is not for the literally faint of heart. They also serve breakfast all day, and while I’m not normally a big fan of benedicts (mostly because Canadian ‘bacon’ is just bad ham), their house benedict is something else: a buttermilk garlic biscuit with a medium egg, a slice of fried green tomato, a few strips of bacon, and a peppery hollandaise sauce poured over the top … and then poured again over the top half of the biscuit. I ordered extra bacon, because we’re all going to die soon anyway so why not enjoy it. (I didn’t actually finish the biscuit, which is good but so heavy.)

Pizza Bruno does Neapolitan style pizza with some other small dishes from the wood-fired oven (including garlic knots with “too much garlic,” as if such a thing were possible), with a traditional dough and both traditional and very non-traditional (cheddar cheese? pineapple?) toppings available. I stuck with the traditional because I’m not a fucking savage, getting a margherita with mushrooms, and would put a 50 or solid-average grade on it, with the dough the best part but the pizza overall too salty, I think because they grate quite a bit of pecorino romano on it right out of the oven.

For coffee in Orlando, I went back to Foxtail in Winter Park, a favorite of mine from a few years ago, and also tried Lineage’s location in the East End Market, a wonderful food hall with a patisserie, a cheesemonger, a juice bar, a ramen place, and more. Lineage is a third-wave roaster and had a few single origins, including a Rwandan coffee from the Kigeyo washing station from near Lake Kivu. Their description promised floral and green apple notes but I tasted a warm spice in the finish, both cinnamon and clove.

Finally, for anyone headed to Walt Disney World during the Flower & Garden show, I can offer a few suggestions on the food at the kiosks this year, since I ate dinner that way one night while also doing some shopping for my daughter, niece, nephew, and some friends’ kids. The best dish I ate was from the Travel & Trellis kiosk: a farm ‘meatball’ wrap, made with Impossible lab-grown meat and served on a lentil-flour bread, which is probably not selling the carnivores among you … but I would really not have been able to tell you this was a meat alternative had I not known that going in. The chocolate pudding at the same stand was the worst thing I ate, so maybe give that a miss. The tuna tataki (Citrus Blossom) was fine, although I think I’d have liked that better raw than seared, and the duck confit with tomatoes and olives with a tiny square of polenta (Fleur de Lys) was also solid. The better choice for dessert was the warm chocolate cake with bourbon-salted caramel sauce and spiced pecans from the Smokehouse, by the USA pavilion. I didn’t care for the karaage, Japanese fried chicken, from the Hanami stand by Japan – I know what karaage is, but this didn’t match up – and never got to a few more things I wanted to try because by then I was very full.

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→ March 1, 2019
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Texas eats, 2019 edition.

Both places I hit in Houston were on Eater’s list of the 38 ‘most essential’ restaurants in the U.S. this year, which tends to be a pretty reliable list for good if occasionally overpriced restaurants. Xochi, a high-end Mexican place downtown, did not disappoint at all: I had just two dishes but it will stick with me for a very, very long time. For dinner I had the crispy duck (pato crujiente) with tomatillo avocado sauce, black beans, and chicharrones. It’s the second-best duck dish I’ve ever eaten, behind only the duck carnitas at NYC’s Cosme, and my only quibble is that there was so much duck and not quite enough of the sauces to go with it. It comes with fresh corn tortillas, and the duck really doesn’t need any additional flavor – it would be fine with just a little lime juice – but the slow cooking process did just start to rob the meat of a little moisture. But the star here was the dessert; Xochi’s dessert menu has a dessert side and a chocolate side, and you’re a damn fool if you think I even looked at the side without chocolate on it. I got the Piedras y Oro, rocks and gold, described as “chocolate tart with crocant of mixed nuts, praline and chocolate “river rocks,” gold from the Isthmus,” which doesn’t quite do it justice. The chocolate tart’s center was warm and has very little flour in it, just enough to hold it together, with a hard, dense cookie-like crust, topped with those frozen pebbles of chocolate, as well as the praline, various candied nuts, and a dark chocolate sauce. It was chocolate indulgence right into your veins. I’m not sure I have ever had a more satisfying sense of oneness with chocolate.

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Himalaya, which serves Indian and Pakistani dishes and has a few flourishes that combine those cuisines with Mexican twists (like a ‘quesadilla’ on paratha bread) also made the list, and I would say I had a mixed experience, partly because I ended up ordering the wrong thing, partly because I don’t know south Asian cuisine all that well. I liked much of what I ate, but it was enough food for more than two of me, and some of what arrived on the lunch special, which the waiter seemed very eager for me to order (probably assuming the white guy wouldn’t know most of the items on the menu, which would not be too far off the mark for me), included meats I no longer eat. The platter came with samples of three curries/similar dishes, one with chickpeas (I think aloo chana masala, with potatoes), one with chicken, and one with lamb, which I don’t eat; as well as a large naan that was leaner than any naad I’ve had before, more than a serving of rice, and a triangle of the same flatbread folded over meat and vegetables. I think it was good, but I also know what I don’t know – I rarely eat Indian or Pakistani food – and probably should have ordered something a la carte.

I tried Siphon Coffee before I headed to lunch, and the preparation of the namesake coffee is quite a show – there’s fire, and it looks like a chemistry experiment – with the resulting cup certainly balanced and smooth without losing any of the nuances of the bean. I just can’t see spending $9 for a cup of coffee other than to do it once to try it.

Moving on to Austin: Better Half Coffee & Cocktails is an all-day café in a cool space that serves coffee from Portland’s heart roasters and has traditional and unusual breakfast items, including the thing I could not possibly pass up, waffled hash browns with coffee-cream gravy and poached eggs. It was decadent, although despite being on the heavy side, it wasn’t greasy, more heavy just because all of those items are calorie-dense, and those hashbrowns were spectacularly crunchy. They were using a single-origin heart coffee even for espressos, which I especially appreciate because it shows someone took some care in selecting the coffee (some single origins are great for pour-overs and awful as espressos).

The Backspace was on that old Food and Wine list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. that I’ve been working my way through over the last five years (I’ve been to 31 of the original 48 places, although at least three have closed), and because I hit it on the early side I was there for their happy hour pricing, where their starters are half off. The roasted beets were great, the roasted cauliflower was bland. The margherita pizza used very high-quality mozzarella, although the dough was ordinary, and overall I’d say it’s on the high side of average (grade 50).

Micklethwait Craft Meats showed up on Daniel Vaughn’s invaluable guide to the ten best BBQ joints in Texas, coming in at #8, with the venerable Franklin up at #2. Since I don’t eat beef, Texas BBQ is largely lost on me, but Micklethwait’s pork ribs were excellent, sweet/salty with a strong smoke flavor and bright pink ring. Both the potato salad, which has mayo but tastes more of mustard, and the tart cole slaw were also excellent. If you do eat cow, they’re known for brisket and beef ribs too.

I also had dinner with my cousin at Cane Rosso, an outpost of the Dallas restaurant, and went with a non-traditional pizza, the “farmer’s only dot com” pie with arugula, mushrooms, and zucchini, topped with pesto but without tomato sauce. The dough here is really the standout, although everything on top was also bright and fresh (it was weird to get good zucchini in mid-February).

My Dallas eats were a bit limited by where I needed to go and the sheer sprawl of the Metroplex. I tried Ascension Coffee but found their pour-over really lacking in flavor or body; I probably should have known when I saw they talked up the ‘blueberry’ note in their Ethiopian Ardi, a note that is often considered a defect in Ethiopian beans. (If you’ve had it, you’d know why – it isn’t a pleasant blueberry flavor and it dominates the cup.) Ascension seems so focused on food that the coffee takes a back seat, which is a shame because it’s possible to do both.

The one other meal of note I had was at the Spiral Diner in Fort Worth, not far from TCU. There are three locations of the all-vegan restaurant, which looks like a ’50s diner gone hipster, and the menu comprises mostly familiar comfort-food dishes that have been veganized. I am not vegan, but like hitting good vegan/vegetarian restaurants on the road to try to keep my diet diverse; that said, Spiral’s menu was too focused on recreating certain non-vegetarian or vegan foods, without the ingenuity of places like Modern Love or Vedge/V Street. I ended up getting a Beyond Burger, which I’ve had before and do find pretty satisfying as a meat alternative (better than any veggie burger I’ve ever tried), and the vegan chipotle mayo that came with it was as good as the real thing. It was just kind of unremarkable, salvaged somewhat by the blueberry pie that also allowed me to taunt Mike Schur on Twitter.

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→ February 24, 2019
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Los Angeles eats, 2019.

The best meal I had on my brief vacation to Los Angeles was at Rosaliné, an upscale Peruvian restaurant that particularly focuses on ceviches and paellas, all of which were superb. The corvina sea bass was the milder of the two we ordered, so the flavor and freshness of the fish shone through, while the ceviche crocante, with raw (but cured) halibut and crispy calamari, tasted more of the sauce, with tart yuzu and a good but not overpowering amount of heat. I’m not a big paella fan, since I think every version I’d ever had in restaurants used cheap rice and was dominated either by tomato or saffron, but the chaufa paella here is excellent, served smoking hot in its cast-iron skillet and tossed table-side so the crispy part of the rice gets mixed in and slightly softened by the steam (so you can chew it without breaking a tooth). It comes with prawns, pancetta, and a little sausage, while their other paella is all shellfish; there isn’t a vegetarian option on the menu but I would imagine they could accommodate you with some notice. I also recommend the pan andino, a house-made bread with quinoa that is served with a rocoto pepper butter and a botoja olive spread that are both fantastic, savory and salty and perfect for spreading on warm bread. We were way too full for dessert.

I had lunch solo at the now curiously-named A.O.C., which predates the ascendance of Ben Shapiro’s favorite Congressperson. It’s a wine bar from Suzanne Goins and Carolyne Styne of Lucques and The Larder, with a small-plates menu that focuses on foods from around the Mediterranean as well as an extensive cheese list that lets you order just a single kind (which I did, trying a pacencia, a raw sheep’s milk cheese from Spain that was like a stronger, nuttier manchego, served with bread, dried fruit, and raw walnuts). For lunch I had the brussels sprouts, radicchio, and burrata sandwich on house-made focaccia, which was a delightful mess and did not skimp on the vegetables, with aged balsamic giving some sweet/tart notes to balance the slight bitterness of those two vegetables. I didn’t plan to have dessert but when I saw the butterscotch pôt de crème with fleur de sel & salted cashew cookies I couldn’t exactly say no – the cookies were good, although I think that’s the kind of cookie that needs to be consumed within a few hours of baking, while the custard was absolutely superb in texture and flavor, with that little bit of salt and big caramel and butter flavors.

Republique, like the first two restaurants I mentioned, made the Eater list of the 38 ‘most essential’ restaurants in LA for the year – I still don’t know what they mean by ‘essential’ but I do find those lists incredibly useful when traveling and rarely have a bad experience at any of their places. It’s modern French in a very cool brick building that was supposedly once owned by Charlie Chaplin, previously occupied by the Nancy Silverton-owned Campanile. Modern French probably misrepresents the food, though, as it’s more just modern global cuisine with French influences. I went with a writer friend and we grazed our way through some of the lighter dishes, skipping the meat/fish mains. The spinach cavatelli with fresh morel mushrooms was among the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had, both because the pasta was so well-made and perfectly cooked and because the morels were … well, morels, which are generally so expensive (they only grow wild, typically after forest fires, and are harvested by hand) that I rarely get to eat them. The grilled octopus salad with multiple kinds of citrus plus pistachios and a hint of chile was another standout, as was the bread with cultured butter and the smoked eel beignets (yep, just what it sounds like, and so good) with horseradish sauce. I normally don’t care for white chocolate desserts but their caramelized white chocolate sabayon with local berries was really superb – the cloying nature of regular white chocolate is dampened by the caramelization, which converts some of the sugars and brings out a broader array of flavors than the one-note sweetness of regular white chocolate.

I met up with movie critic Tim Grierson, with whom I’ve had a longrunning email dialogue but had never actually met in person, at The Henry in west Hollywood, where I had that rarest of things, a truly memorable salad, in a rather over-the-top (if on brand for that area) space. The green garden kale salad has romanesco and broccoli along with kale, brussels sprouts, green beans, snow peas, arugula, pistachios, and comes with a tahini vinaigrette that was lighter than most tahini dressings (like goddess dressing, which I do like quite a bit, but can be heavy).

Molly Knight and I had dinner at Badmaash, a favorite of hers, located on Fairfax a few doors down from Jon & Vinny’s. Badmaash has both traditional Indian dishes and some strange mashups like Chicken Tikka Poutine – fries topped with gravy and chicken tikka and cheese curds, good but definitely too heavy for me – and chili cheese naan, where the naan dough is wrapped around cheese and serranos and comes out like a stuffed pizza (but much better than that, obviously). The traditional samosa and rosemary naan were actually my favorite dishes, though, because they were so simple but well done, and since I seldom eat Indian food because there are so many things on Indian restaurant menus I can’t eat.

Stella Barra pizzeria is a solid 50 for me, which probably puts it in the lower tier of my pizzeria rankings since I tend to avoid places I hear are below-average; I thought their dough was quite good if stretched a little too thick, and don’t love that their white pizzas come with a ‘parmesan cream sauce,’ whatever that is – true white Neapolitan pizzas shouldn’t have anything like that. But the toppings on the two pizzas we tried, the sausage and fennel as well as the spinach & kale with garlic and green onions, were very high quality. I’m usually a purist when it comes to old-fashioneds, but their lavender-tinged version was surprisingly good.

I did all my coffee-ing at Verve and Andante, as well as tea in both spots as well; Verve was slightly better in both categories, especially for pour-over coffee, and they offer hojicha, my personal favorite green tea (the leaves are roasted, so the flavor is deeper and less grassy). Verve’s space was nearly always packed, while Andante had more room to chill, although one time I was in the latter’s shop near the Grove and realized I was the only person there not working on a screenplay.

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→ January 12, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 1/12/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, as I’m working on the prospect rankings and saving those extra bullets in the hope that someone like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado will eventually sign. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the deduction board game Cryptid, one of my top ten games of 2018, in which each player gets one clue, and you need to deduce all other players’ clues to identify the one hex on the variable board where the Creature is hiding for that specific board and set of clues. It’s quite fun, like a board game with a puzzle at its heart.

And now, the links…

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→ December 14, 2018
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Las Vegas eats, 2018 edition.

Three days and four nights in Las Vegas did at least mean a few interesting meals in a city that is known for overpriced celebrity chef-backed restaurants on the Strip but that has a vibrant food culture once you leave the gaudy façade and head a few miles in any direction.

The best meal I had all week was at The Black Sheep, a Vietnamese-influenced spot in a strip mall (of course) in Rhodes Ranch in southwest Vegas. There was no way I wasn’t ordering the cocktail called Mr. Brownstone – once I saw it on the drink menu, it wouldn’t leave me alone – which comes with an ice cube made of brown sugar, ginger, and mint. The server heats the top of it with a kitchen torch, and then pours the bourbon into the divot the flame created. I would just counsel you to drink it fast, because I didn’t and then the drink became overly sweet at the very end.

Their duck confit was similarly calling me from the menu and was superb. It comes with Israeli couscous, cooked a little past al dente, with a mild yellow curry sauce, onions, and shaved Chinese broccoli. There was also a single flower on the dish which I realized at some point was no longer on the dish because everything tasted so good I ate the flower without realizing it. For dessert, they had two options, a chocolate tres leches cake that is always on the menu and a seasonal persimmon bread pudding; I took the former and regret nothing. The chocolate cake is served with a chocolate ‘nest’ on top, a disk of lacey dark chocolate, as well as Vietnamese coffee mousse, cocoa nibs, and a Tahitian vanilla crème anglaise. It took an award-winning effort of willpower to stop myself from finishing the entire cake.

Settebello is a VPN-certified pizzeria with two Nevada locations, one in Henderson and one in Red Rock, plus three in California and one in Salt Lake City. They import many of their key ingredients from Italy, including the flour in the dough and real prosciutto di Parma; the crust is soft with visible char on the outside, although I expected a slightly airier feel to the edges. I tried their namesake Settebello pizza, a margherita base with sausage roasted in their wood oven, pancetta, mushrooms, and pine nuts. I don’t think it needs both meats, but the sausage had a good smoky note from the oven and the pine nuts provide some crunch to contrast with the soft center of the dough.

Flock and Fowl is a fried chicken joint with a handful of not-fried-chicken items on the menu, but really, if you’re going here, it’s to eat fried chicken and drink their ‘flocktails.’ I kept it simple with the two-piece (drumstick and thigh) plate with rice, slaw, and pickles; the chicken was outstanding, perfectly crispy on the outside but tender on the inside, on the salty side but cooked so well that I was fine with the sodium hit. The spicy sambal sauce it’s served with has a nice, complex flavor if you can handle the heat, which is significant. The rice was served ‘plain’ but had a natural buttery taste to it; the slaw, on the other hand, had zero flavor at all and needed some kind of acidity. We also ordered the “boneless wings” (I know, not a thing) with a salt and Sichuan pepper (which isn’t really pepper, but does taste very much like it) crust; their flavor was perfect, not spicy but just a bit hot, while the meat on the interior was a little overcooked. I drank a Lychee’s Knees cocktail, with gin, lychee, and lemon, fruitier than I normally go for in drinks but the interplay of the lychee’s sweetness and the herbal notes in the gin worked well.

On the breakfast side, I didn’t do quite as well; all three places I tried were just okay. The Peppermill was probably the best of the three, even though its atmosphere leaves everything to be desired. Just get something with hash browns in it – that was the best thing I ate there – but skip the hot blueberry or apple muffins, which are overloaded with sugar. CraftKitchen in Henderson has an incredible menu and a well-known area chef behind it, but the crab cake benedict I got was surprisingly light on flavor; the egg was perfectly poached but the crab cake was mostly bread crumbs, and there was too much moisture in the dish for the bread to handle. PublicUs is a hipster coffee shop – no, Jakie Wohl wasn’t there – with a full menu of egg dishes and avocado toast. The sourdough waffle was quite good, definitely a unique combination of flavor and texture, but the Portuguese sausage I got on the side was lukewarm.

For coffee, Mothership in Henderson is your best bet, with house-roasted single origins available on drip or as pour-over; I got their current option from Rwanda and the roast was perfect so some of the stone fruit flavors came through in the cup. I also had coffee at PublicUs twice; their “macchiato” is not a traditional one, even though I asked the woman who took my order that specific question, so what I got had way more milk than I like, and the pour-over I got the second time came in a mug that was cold so the coffee cooled off too quickly … and the drink was $8, which might be a fair price in a decade after climate change has crushed the global coffee crop but is ridiculous right now for a bean (from Costa Rica) that isn’t that special.

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→ October 27, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

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→ July 18, 2018
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DC eats, 2018 edition.

The Futures Game was more or less in my backyard this year, a shade over two hours away in Washington DC, so I drove down there on Saturday before my event at Politics & Prose (many thanks to the 120-plus of you who came to see Jay Jaffe and me speak) and then drove home on Monday morning, in time to get my daughter from camp and head to the Wilmington Blue Rocks game with her that night. That did limit the amount of time I had for culinary exploration, but I did try three new spots.

Little Pearl is the third outpost in the Rose’s Luxury empire, taking the little daytime café concept from the front of Pineapple & Pearls and spinning it out into its own location, which was buzzing on Sunday morning despite the heat and Little Pearl’s small, eclectic menu. Their daytime menu includes six “sandwiches,” including the gravlax toast, in which the cured salmon comes cubed and tossed with avocado, heirloom tomato, a little crème fraîche, capers, dill, and pepitas, on a thick slice of sourdough bread. I’m a sucker for any sort of smoked or cured salmon (or, if I’m somewhere I trust, even raw), and this was really spectacular, satisfying with the combination of fats, with just a little acidity from the tomatoes and the capers to balance it out. The salmon used for the gravlax must be of extremely high quality given how clean and bright its flavor was; sometimes curing can accentuate fishier flavors in salmon, which is an oily fish to begin with, but Little Pearl’s was bright and fresh. I also tried the potato donut, which was incredibly light and airy, benefiting from the reduction in gluten that comes from swapping out some wheat flour for potato. (It does not taste like potato, if you’re wondering.) The menu also includes spicy fried chicken, a novel twist on a burger, a few salads, gelato, and some grab-and-go items like a yogurt parfait or banana bread (which is cake, really). They use Passenger coffee from Lancaster for their coffee bar, which includes a full array of espresso options.

Tail Up Goat opened in 2016 in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC and has already earned a Michelin star. The menu changes often, but I believe their crispy salt cod croquettes are a regular fixture, with good reason, as they hit exactly the right note of the distinctive and, yes, salty flavor of that classic peasant food (what you might know as bacalhao in Portuguese or baccalà in Italian), whipped with potato until smooth, here served with smoked cauliflower and pickled onion. Salt cod is going to have a fishy note, but whether it’s a pleasant one depends on how it’s prepared, and here it’s prepared exceptionally so you’re almost getting the memory of that note rather than the overpowering flavor of badly prepared fish. The new potatoes with romano beans and herbs were perfectly cooked although eating them at the same time as the salt cod was probably our mistake.

The stracciatella with peaches, shallots, basil leaves, and pepitas was another highlight; the cheese, similar to the center of burrata but worked more to develop the stretchy curds that give the cheese its name, shone like a fresh ricotta, and although it’s a little early around these parts for peaches – I believe our local pick-your-own place has one variety that’s ready – these were sweet like peak-season fruit. We tried two of the pasta dishes, a spring pea agnolotti with chanterelles and roasted carrots as well as a tagliatelle with sausage and an herb pesto, with the agnolotti the better of the two, with more tooth to the dough and a higher filling/pasta ratio than you’d find with other agnolotti, which benefited the dish since the peas’ flavor is subtler than that of red meat. The tagliatelle was rolled a little thinner than I like that cut of pasta, which I think is best when you really have something to sink your teeth into, but that’s a matter of personal taste. They also make a daiquiri with Neisson Rhum Agricole, a 100 proof rum made from sugar cane rather than molasses, and Smith & Cross traditional rum, as well as lime, orange, and cardamom, but it’s really rum-forward rather than losing those flavors in citrus or sweetening agents. As for the name, it’s from a saying on the co-owner’s birthplace in the Virgin Islands: “Tail up goat, tail down sheep.”

I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Fangraphs crew to Timber Pizza on Saturday night, after Jay and I finished our signing and we’d all had beers at Comet Ping-Pong (the basement was closed for a private event, to our dismay). They call their pizza “Neapolitan-ish,” which is only accurate in that the crust is thin, but the style is really quite different – the crust’s edges aren’t puffy and charred, and the center isn’t wet – so this is somewhere more like Roman-style pizza, with a thinner, crispier crust than you’d get at a true Neapolitan joint. It’s all still good, just a matter of what you like in your pizza. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the cured meats Timber used, especially the pepperoni, something I almost never eat because I find it too salty and greasy and a source of immediate regret. Theirs was none of those things, least of all the last part, and I’d order it again, although I also loved their green pizzas with basil pesto, including the Penelope (fresh mozzarella, mushrooms, bacon, and smoked paprika) and the Green Monster (fresh mozzarella, feta, kale, and zucchini). If you’re into pizza and in DC, I do have a bit of bad news: 2 Amy’s is closed for the foreseeable future after a pipe burst in their kitchen on July 7th, flooding the place and causing substantial damage everywhere. They haven’t been able to give a projected date for a re-open.

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→ April 1, 2018
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Raleigh and Durham eats, 2018 edition.

Downtown Raleigh has seen a huge renaissance over the last few years, especially in the area where Ashley Christensen’s main restaurants are. Now just one block over on Blount Street are two of the best new restaurants in the Triangle, according to Eater, in Mofu Shoppe and Bharvana Brewery.

Mofu Shoppe grew out of the Pho Nomenal Dumplings food truck whose owners won season 6 of something called the Great Food Truck Race and invested their winnings in their first brick and mortar location, with their signature pork and chive dumplings on the menu. I went with small plates so I could try more things at every place I tried for dinner this week, which here included those dumplings, crispy Brussels sprouts with sweet sriracha sauce and bacon, and the pork belly rice bowl. The dumplings are superb, pleasantly chewy, with the right amount of filling and very even flavors of chive and garlic. The Brussels sprouts were my favorite, even though they’re about a grade spicier than I would typically eat; the bacon lardons are thickly sliced and stand up to the sprouts well, but I didn’t care for the crème fraîche served underneath, which was too tangy, like sour cream. The pork belly rice bowl is a great concept, although I ended up liking it less than I expected. The idea seems to be to take the flavors of German potato salad and put them into a dish similar to bibimbap, so you get rice, a poached egg, pork belly, and a slaw with a mustardy vinaigrette. The dressing on the slaw overwhelmed the other flavors in the dish, unfortunately. For dessert, I went with the Vietnamese coffee mousse, which is just what it sounds like; imagine the texture of softly whipped cream and the flavor of good coffee ice cream.

Just across the street is Bhavana Brewery, a combination brewery, restaurant, book store, and flower/home decor store. (That’s not an April Fool’s Day joke.) The owners also run a Laotian restaurant next door and this menu is heavily East Asian-influenced, although it doesn’t adhere to any particular tradition from that continent. Again going with small plates, I took my server’s suggestions and ordered the steamed soup dumplings (xiao long bao), the vegetable gyoza, the seafood dumplings in mushroom sauce, and the duck egg rolls (that was my one pick among the four). The soup dumplings were the best dish, filled with a mixture of crab and pork meat, with a good balance of broth, meat, and dough, with the crab balancing out what could have been a fairly heavy filling had it been only pork. The vegetable dumplings were my least favorite, with a grassy note and a flat flavor that needed some heat and probably more salt/umami to boost it. The server did recommend the scallion pancake with bone marrow, but that sounded way too heavy for me. They do indeed brew their own beers, with a wide and rotating selection, but unfortunately their limited book selection did not include Smart Baseball.

The Lakewood is the new restaurant from the chef-owner of Scratch Bakery, which closed its downtown Durham location about a month ago and reopened in the space adjacent to this new restaurant just off Chapel Hill Road a little west of downtown. The Lakewood has a straightforward menu of small plates and sides that are more vegetable/seafood-focused and a half-dozen meat-centric main plates, plus, of course, fantastic desserts. I stuck with small plates once more and went with the roasted cauliflower with salsa verde, the parsnip pierogis with radishes, and the shrimp toast, the last of which was the star of the meal, coming drenched in a slightly sweet soy-sesame sauce. The cauliflower was a bit of a miss, as it was unevenly seasoned and underdone in the center of some of the florets; I probably should have caved to my baser instincts and ordered the Brussels sprouts with bacon jam instead. I chose the weirdest dessert on the menu, a rice tart with roasted carrot sorbet, which came in a traditional French tart crust with a thick custard in it that had some broken rice grains and was not terribly sweet, since the sweetness came from that carrot sorbet. That was the best thing on the plate, with a deep, earthy sweetness and a gorgeous deep orange color.

Jubala Coffee in Raleigh serves Counter Culture Coffee with multiple single-origin options, even offering two for espresso drinks in addition to the regular blend. They also offer sweet biscuits with various options, including egg and bacon or sausage sandwiches, with the eggs cooked to order; I prefer biscuits without that sweetness, but the texture of these was still excellent and the over medium egg was cooked perfectly. On the Durham side of the triangle, Cocoa Cinnamon, a recommendation from a co-worker of mine, roasts its own coffee (under the 4th Dimension label) and offers a couple of pour-over options, as well as churros at their Lakewood location, although I went to a different shop and didn’t think churros for breakfast was the most sensible plan.

I did hit two places I’ve been before: Durham’s Nanataco, which has never failed me yet and had one of my favorite special meat options, hog jowl, as a monthly feature; and Raleigh’s Beasley’s for fried chicken.

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→ March 2, 2018
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Miami eats, 2018 edition.

I hadn’t spent any time in Miami since I went to the U to see Yasmani Grandal and Matt Harvey face each other back in 2010 – Grandal took him deep – but have now been there twice inside of nine months, for last year’s Futures Game and now to see the University of Florida’s two first-round pitchers pitch against the Canes.

The big novelty of the trip was the brand new St. Roch Food Market in the Design District just north of downtown, not far from Wynwood. This is the second St. Roch, with the original in New Orleans, and I believe this location has different vendors with the same concept – a 10,000 square foot open area with about a dozen different stalls along the walls, selling all kinds of food, including a salad stand, a noodle bar, a pasta/Italian stand, a Japanese stand with cooked and raw fish preparations, a coffee/tea bar, and a vegan bakery. You pay at each stand as you order, and at least in my case someone brought the food to my table since I was sitting nearby. I ate at the Japanese stand first, getting a seaweed salad and a grilled freshwater eel dish over rice with radishes and allegedly cucumbers (which were nowhere to be found). The vegan bakery is better than you’d expect, or than I expected, with an excellent shortbread-only version of a Linzer tarte called a ‘compassion cookie’ because they intend to donate a portion of the proceeds from its sale to animal shelters. The coffee stand uses Counter Culture beans and a high-end tea purveyor I hadn’t heard of. The whole concept is fantastic – it’s fresh food, mostly made to order, with great inputs – but on day one their execution was spotty. Another stand didn’t have one of its main proteins ready, and didn’t tell me until I’d paid and the order had gone to the cook. I’m hoping that was just Opening Day jitters.

I ate two meals down in Coral Gables, both above average. The Local is on the Miracle Mile pedestrian-only street, serving southern-inspired dishes, a lot of them takes on bar food, with an extensive cocktail list as well. Their cornmeal-crusted catfish was outstanding, perfectly crispy on the outside and hot enough that it had to have come right from the fryer; it’s served on a mild remoulade with hand-cut fries on the side that had probably been sitting a little while before I was served. They have about a half-dozen craft cocktails of impressive complexity as well.

Shelley’s is a very unassuming seafood bar very close to the Canes’ stadium, with maybe 2/3 of the menu items including fish or shellfish. I went with the server’s suggestions for both starter and main; the mofongo fritters were lighter than I expected, served with both a sugar cane compound butter and a clear garlic-chili sauce, while the rum-glazed scallops were perfectly cooked as well, but I thought the whole combination of scallops with house-cured ham and candied pecans overpowered the delicate flavor of the scallops themselves.

I mentioned Panther Coffee in my wrap-up last July, and went there twice on this trip, also grabbing a bag of beans from Finca La Illusion, a Nicaraguan farm, to bring home. I don’t know how long they’ll have it but it’s excellent, big bodied with some warm berry notes and a mild cocoa note too.

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→ January 20, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

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