→ 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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→ June 22, 2012
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NYC eats + Flip Burger in Atlanta.

Mario Batali’s Lupa, a “Roman-style osteria,” focuses on traditional Italian dishes (both primi, pasta dishes, and secondi, proteins), done with top-quality ingredients and many elements produced in-house. In Italy, you’d typically have a primo and a secondo at a high-end restaurant, but the portions at Lupa were too large for us to order that way, so we each went with a starter, a primo, and dessert.

Everything I had was strong, but there were minor execution issues with both the appetizer and the dessert that didn’t match the memorable primo. That pasta dish was a special that night, house-made pappardelle with a soffrito-based duck ragout, meaning it had no tomatoes in it. The ragout was hearty and rich but not heavy and was correctly seasoned, while the pappardelle were cooked perfectly al dente, of course. The starter, a salad of arugula, radish, fennel, and radicchio, comprised top-quality vegetables but was slightly overdressed – not enough to have it pooling on the bottom of the dish, but enough that the vinegar overpowered the peppery/spicy produce underneath it, which was slightly disappointing. For dessert, the zuppa inglese – an Italian spin on an English trifle, with the sponge cake soaked in espresso – was marred by a crunchy powder on top that was too hard to chew; I’m assuming the powder was there for texture contrast with the soft trifle (custard and soft sponge cake) but ended up detracting from the dish as a whole. My wife’s fresh mozzarella di bufala appetizer came with a strongly-flavored herb/olive oil mixture, with the fresh oregano taking over the dish a little, a combination I really liked but she didn’t. Her main course was asparagus agnolotti in a light butter sauce, tasting, as it should, strongly of fresh asparagus (in the agnolotti and shaved over the top). Her favorite dish of the night was the hazelnut tartufo, which I didn’t try.

I’m nitpicking here because of where I was – these are minor execution issues, not problems with concepts or ingredients. But I expected a 70, and paid like the restaurant was a 70, but what I got was more 60 or strong 55, recommended, but not a place I’m racing to visit again.

At Citi Field on Saturday night I had my first experience with the cult favorite burger joint Shake Shack; locations in stadiums, like airports, aren’t always the best way to judge a food outlet, so this may be low, but I’d grade the meal as a 60 shake, a 55 burger, and 50 fries. The caramel shake lived up to the name, smooth and strongly flavored (although it’s weird to have any caramel ice cream product without salt), with perfect mouthfeel – no iciness, no graininess. Shake Shack’s burgers are made from a proprietary blend of beef, which their site says is antibiotic-free Angus beef, “vegetarian fed, humanely raised and source verified,” and the burger does taste very strongly of good quality beef – salty, and a little greasy from the grill (albeit in a good way, not like Smashburger’s). As fast food burgers go, it’s better than In-n-Out’s, but In-n-Out destroys Shake Shack in the fries department, as this Shake Shack’s weren’t freshly cut (I don’t know about regular locations) and I could very easily have skipped them. They also have, or at least say they have, a strong commitment to sustainability and limiting their footprint, which doesn’t make the food taste any better but is always nice to hear. If their regular locations are better than the stadium stand – their menus are more extensive, and the food is probably even fresher – I couldn’t see choosing In-n-Out or Five Guys over this.

‘wichcraft, Tom Colicchio’s mini-chain of high-end sandwich shops mostly around New York City, is a small marvel – charging marginally more than national sandwich stores like Panera that peddle massively inferior food. I’m not sure how widely you can expand this concept, but it’s great that it even exists and shows that it is possible to run a business with responsibly-sourced, high-quality ingredients, like pole-caught tuna or organic arugula, made on some of the best bread you will ever find at a sandwich place. My only criticism of that tuna sandwich, made with shaved fennel, diced green olives, and a very light touch of fresh mayonnaise, was that it was hard to keep the sandwich together, but the flavors worked well together. It’s a $9 sandwich, but a far better value than a $6, mayo-drenched tuna salad at a national chain.

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On my last trip to Georgia, I did manage to run over to Flip Burger, Richard Blais’ high-end burger “boutique” that now has two locations in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, and features several different types of burgers as well as milkshakes made with liquid nitrogen, which sounds cool but does have the benefit of producing a smoother finished product. The shake was an even bigger star than the burger, just like at Shake Shack but better on both counts – I couldn’t pull the trigger on the foie gras milkshake, and the Krispy Kreme one just sounded too sweet, so I went for the caramel turtle shake, which was surprisingly balanced, sweet but also salty and even a little savory. For the burger, I went with the rbq, a 5.5-ounce patty of hanger steak, brisket, and short rib, topped with pulled smoked brisket, coleslaw, barbeque sauce, and “smoked” mayo; it was something of an umami explosion, rich and very meaty – if you like the flavor of really high-quality beef, this is your burger. I wouldn’t have deleted a thing. The fries are cooked in beef tallow, which I respect tremendously, but this batch was too greasy for me to enjoy, probably a sign that the fat wasn’t hot enough. Needless to say, I was still full about six hours later. Flip does offer non-beef options, including a “fauxlafel” burger, as well as salads and a full bar.

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→ March 26, 2011
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Vegas, Phoenix, and Oklahoma eats.

New draft blog entry is up on Texas RHP Taylor Jungmann. Yesterday’s chat transcript is up. And I was on the Baseball Today podcast (link goes directly to the downloadable mp3) on Friday.

Anyway, time for another omnibus food post, since I haven’t had enough in any one spot for a blog entry.

I made two trips to Vegas this month, but focused on old favorite spots like Firefly and Lotus of Siam (try the tamarind beef – it’s plus). The one new place I tried was Mon Ami Gabi, a French restaurant in Paris Las Vegas (and in Chicago, which I believe is the original) that manages to slide in under the price point of the typical fine-dining experience on the Strip. I can only speak to one dish, the trout grenobloise ($18), which was excellent – a great piece of fish perfectly cooked if a little lightly sauced, with a big pile of sauteed haricots verts on the side. I was quite impressed by their version of the premeal bread basket, a crusty warm baguette brought to the table in a white paper bag. They’re apparently known for their steak frites ($23-ish), but I can’t pass up a good piece of fish, which is my favorite dish.

Back to Phoenix, I finally made it to Barrio Cafe on 16th, a frequent recommendation from readers that’s just located in an area I never hit. It’s upscale Mexican, somewhere between Los Sombreros and real fine dining but with clear ambitions toward the latter. The chips and bread come with a spicy, vinegared tapenade that’s more Mediterranean than Mexican and that I could have eaten all night. The guacamole is made tableside – a pointless, showy exercise that cuts off any flavor development, but salvaged somewhat by extremely high-quality ingredients, including the unusual addition of fresh pomegranate seeds. (Between those and the avocado the bowl could have made a nutritionist smile.)

For my main course, I couldn’t pass up the seared duck breast in a sweet and sour tamarind sauce, featuring two of my favorite ingredients (although I’m more of a leg man than a breast man … still talking about duck, people). The duck breast had to be at least briefly roasted after the sear as it was cooked medium rather than the standard medium-rare, but stopped short of drying out, something no sauce on the planet can save. That sauce, by the way, wouldn’t have been out of place in an Asian restaurant, neither too sweet nor too sour and with a dark, savory note underneath to keep it from becoming cloying. My colleague Matt Meyers went with the cochinita pibil, a slow-roasted pork shoulder that, judging by the empty plate in front of him, was probably something north of adequate.

I’ve been reluctant to try much sushi in Arizona given some mediocre raw-fish experiences around the Valley over the last few years; our distance from actual water and lack of real high-end restaurants downtown to support the kind of fresh-fish business you’d find in most comparably-sized cities leads to a lot of mediocre product sold as sushi to unsuspecting consumers. Otaku in Chandler (on Gilbert Road south of the 202/Santan) is promising, at least by my tempered expectations, with some highs and lows in a recent lunch visit. I placed two orders for nigiri in addition to a bento box, just to expand my sample size. The maguro was nothing special, definitely fresh but on the bland side, but the sea bass with a light ponzu sauce was well-balanced, the fresh flavor of the fish coming through* with the texture of fish that’s not just fresh but handled properly.

* I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: If the sushi has a sauce on it, don’t dip it in the soy sauce. The chef has already taken care of seasoning for you.

The bento box option was a mixed bag, although I have to say it’s a lot of food for about $11-12. The server recommended the chicken with curry, more of a southeast Asian dish than Japanese, like a brown Thai curry, featuring a lot of fresh red bell pepper and white meat chicken but a little mild overall. The box comes with eight pieces of California roll featuring shredded crab and a small amount of mayonnaise, two gyoza, and a spring roll; the gyoza were the only positive of that group, as the others were just ordinary, nothing you couldn’t find at a hundred other sushi joints in the area. My main concern was the mesclun salad, with a couple of leaves that had started to go bad, just a sign that someone in the kitchen isn’t paying attention when he grabs them out of a drawer.

Re-reading that I’m probably giving you the sense that Otaku was worse than it actually is; nothing was unpleasant or badly cooked or poorly seasoned, and the fact that the raw fish was fresh is a positive. It’s at least worth another visit, which is more than I can say for most of the other sushi places I’ve tried in Arizona, but it’s not going to live up to most of the California sushi I’ve had. I’d give Otaku a preliminary grade of 50, but more like a 45 on the bento box.

I’m writing this on the plane back from Tulsa, which was as disappointing for the food as it was rewarding for the prospects. The two best spots were in Bartlesville, about 45 minutes north of Tulsa, where Dylan Bundy pitched in a high school tournament. Dink’s Barbecue on Frank Phillips Rd had good brisket and fried okra but the hot links were just weird, with a hard red casing like you’d find on a wheel of gouda and a rubbery texture inside, while the green beans were stewed into grey mushiness. Jared’s Frozen Custard on Nowata was outstanding, though, comparable to good Wisconsin frozen custard in texture and flavor – I had one of the special flavors of the day, mocha, which tasted like a light and sweet Dunkin Donuts coffee (bad flavor for hot coffee, good for ice cream), in a concrete with Oreos. Duds in Tulsa itself included breakfast at the Wild Fork, where the food was mediocre but better than the service; and Albert G’s, a well-reviewed and popular Q joint on Harvard, where I got a big serving of bone-dry brisket with absolutely zero smoke flavor. I’ll pass along a reader rec for breakfast that I never managed to hit, The Old School Bagel Factory on Peoria, which would be on my list if I ever happen to be back in Tulsa – not that unlikely, since I didn’t get Broken Arrow’s Archie Bradley this time around.

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→ July 11, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part two.

Two new articles up on ESPN.com: Cliff Lee trade breakdown and brief reports on all of the players in Sunday’s Futures Game.

I took a few of your suggestions for Q and sushi in the Traingle area and stumbled on very solid frozen custard joint for my second run through North Carolina.

I’ll start with the sushi: Waraji seems to be, by acclamation, the best sushi place in the Triangle, and it may very well be that, but it’s not very good. Better than Little Tokyo, but still not good. The fish was completely tasteless; one fish, “white fish,” recommended by the chef who served me, was chewy and sinewy; they don’t offer anago or tai and were out of kanpachi; and they charged me for a nirigi I ordered but never received. The seaweed salad cost $8 and was really portioned for two, although it was the greenest I’ve ever seen, making me wonder about its legitimacy.

I tried Allen & Sons and The Pit for Q, and would unequivocally vote for the latter despite its inauthentic setting. The Pit is the only upscale Q joint I’ve come across in my travels – they even have a wine collection – and the place was filled with businessmen and -women at lunchtime. I ordered a combination plate at my server’s suggestion, getting the St. Louis ribs, the pulled pork, fried okra, and collard greens; the platter also comes with a biscuit and hush puppies, so I was full enough that I didn’t need dinner for about eight hours. The pulled pork was dry but both meats had a nice, subtle smoke flavor, and the ribs were fall-apart tender*. The okra was excellent – I’m starting to like eating in the south for the fried okra more than for the Q – and for about $12 the quantity of food was a little absurd. It’s not wow barbecue, and had a little bit of the feel of mass-smoked meat, as opposed to some guy in a shack who does it one pork shoulder at time, but it was very solid.

*There seems to be some real disagreement over whether ribs of any animal should be smoked till the meat falls off the bone. I’m in the “yes” camp, as ribs have a lot of connective tissue that I have no interest in eating. When the meat falls off the bone, the connective tissue will be largely gone. This, to me, is the entire point of low-and-slow cooking, whether it’s smoking or braising.

Allen & Sons looks good in the uniform, but the tools didn’t really play. It’s in a run-down building just off I-40 in Chapel Hill, and the menu is limited to “Carolina pork” and ribs, with the pork as their signature item. What came looked like some had scraped it off the wall after a pig exploded, an oily, vinegary, sloppy mess that tasted only of vinegar and not in the least of smoke. The best thing I can say about the dish is that it came with five hush puppies, as even the cole slaw was drowning in a mayo-vinegar slurry. It’s too bad, since that’s the sort of place where I’d expect to find the sort of artisanal work I thought the Pit’s pork lacked, but if you’re not going to put smoke flavor into the smoked meat, you might as well stick the thing in an oven.

Goodberry’s is a local chain of frozen custard shops that I think would stand up well against the competition of Milwaukee, still the capital of frozen custards as far as I can tell. Goodberry’s felt a little richer, with more butterfat, but the texture was an 80 and the chocolate, despite being a little light in color, had a rich natural cocoa flavor. They offer vanilla, chocolate, sugar-free vanilla, and a rotating flavor of the day; I was disappointed that coconut wasn’t coming until the 16th, since that + chocolate is one of my favorite ice cream flavor pairings. They also offer a long list of toppings, including freshly roasted nuts (I don’t think they’re roasted on site, though), so I’ll recommend the chocolate with Oreos and almonds combo. The location I went to, on Kildare Farms Road in Cary, has no indoor seating but there are tables with umbrellas for shade.

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→ September 11, 2009
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Milwaukee eats, 2009.

I was on Mike and Mike this morning and apparently made Scott Feldman a left-hander. Good times. The moral of this story, since I was thinking about Feldman’s cutter as a weapon against lefties, is not to think when talking on the radio. I did 90-minute chat and believe I got everyone’s handedness right, so there’s that.

Joe Posnanski mentions me in his new column for Sports Illustrated, which means I’ll probably hear from a whole new group of people from my childhood who had no idea I was a sportswriter.

I didn’t do much new in Milwaukee from my last trip, revisiting Cempazuchi (and ordering the same stuff) and Beans & Barley (going for the whole wheat pancakes, which were very good but very wheaty). I finally visited Kopp’s for frozen custard, and it was very good, particularly the texture, which was probably an 80 on the 20-80 scale – you’re not likely to find smoother custard on the planet. Their chocolate isn’t very chocolatey, but the only place I hit last year that had a strong chocolate custard had the worst texture.

I had breakfast at Hotch-a-Do, across the street from Beans & Barley, a really funky, very local place that unfortunately only opens at 9 am. The blueberry and banana pancakes were a little rich and mildly flavored but generally good, although I’d probably give something else on the menu a shot next time around. They do serve Alterra coffee, which I tried the next day at the Alterra stand at the Milwaukee airport. I’ve largely given up drip coffee, but Matthew Leach at mlb.com swears by Alterra, and he didn’t lie – that is some Damn Fine Coffee, dark but not overroasted, with plenty of character of the bean (Nicaraguan, mildly acidic but well-rounded with good body), and brewed at the right strength.

Matthew and I also had dinner at Elsa’s on the Park after I found out that Sobelman’s was closed for dinner on Labor Day (but open in the afternoon … that makes, well, no sense). He raved about his burger, but mine was cooked enough to serve as a coaster despite the fact that I ordered it medium. They also lose points for having no beer on tap and almost nothing local, but I did enjoy a Chicago beer, Goose Island Matilda, a “strong Belgian pale ale” that was a rich amber with great body and a pronounced note of good-quality honey.

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→ September 5, 2009
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Philadelphia eats.

Before I get to Philly, a few of you have asked about the restaurant where my cousin is the pastry chef. It’s called City Limits Diner, and there are two locations, one on the edge of White Plains near Yonkers, the other in Stamford, Connecticut. My cousin is the pastry chef and her husband is the executive chef. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t genuinely like the food. If you do go, make sure you have dessert, and tell your server that Tracy’s cousin Keith sent you (not that it will get you anything, but it’ll score me some points).

I ate all of my non-ballpark meals in Philly at Reading Terminal Market, an eating paradise on Filbert between 11th and 12th streets, right across from the Market East train station. I could have stayed a week and still had places there I wanted to try.

For breakfast, I hit the Dutch Eating Place – Dutch as in Pennsylvania Dutch, a community responsible for at least ten of the stands around the market. They’re best known for their blueberry pancakes, which were solid average or a bit above, and for their cured meats, which were a mixed bag – the pork sausage was meaty and peppery and the portion was beyond generous, but the turkey bacon was gamey and greasy. I also tried their “apple” french toast, which as far as I can tell, was just some whole or multi-grain sandwich bread, dipped in egg batter, fried, and topped with too much cheap cinnamon, with no evidence whatsoever of apples. The pancakes were worth a trip, though. Cash only, cost $10 including tea and tip both days.

DiNic’s serves hot Italian sandwiches in just a few varieties, but everyone recommended the roast pork, thinly sliced, served on fresh crusty Italian bread, with just a few possible toppings – sharp provolone, roasted peppers (sweet or hot), broccoli rabe, or spinach. I went with the rabe and sweet peppers. The sandwich was about a foot long, so I barely got halfway through it, and the inside of the bread was soaked with the juice of the pork (that’s a good thing). For about $8 it’s a bargain and was the best thing I ate on the trip.

Delilah’s Soul Food had some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. Even though the chicken was more warm than hot when I got it, the crust was still crispy, not greasy, and was well seasoned with salt and pepper without having too much of either. For $8.50 or so you get chicken, cornbread (the sweet kind, unfortunately), and one side; I chose collard greens and got a big bowl that I got maybe halfway through and then poured the juice at the bottom over the cornbread. It’s one of the few places in RTM with table service.

The Famous Fourth Street Cookie Company had a long line around lunch time on my first trip there; the cookies are constantly coming out of the oven, so you can get something hot at that hour, although I found that at room temperature a few hours later, they were just average cookies. They’re a good four inches or so in diameter and cost about $2 apiece. The “double chocolate chip” is just a chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chips, and the chocolate chip with pecans didn’t skimp on the nuts.

I grabbed a pumpkin muffin from Le Bus Bakery for the flight home; it was a bit greasy, staining the paper bag, but it didn’t have the usual pumpkin muffin flavor of stale pumpkin pie spice mix, and it wasn’t overly sweet. There was a faint spicy note, almost like cardamom, but otherwise the pumpkin was allowed to take its place at the center of the muffin.

Leaving RTM, La Colombe is a small cafe best known for its coffee-roasting operation, as they apparently supply many of the best restaurants in town. I found their espresso to be far too watery with no body, but it did have a defined flavor, with strong notes of cocoa beans and a pleasant acidity. My guess is that the beans were from Africa, although I’m no expert on varietals since I always use blends to make espresso at home.

I learned about Capogiro Gelato a few years ago on the short-lived Food Network show, The Hungry Detective, a good concept dressed up with a few too many gimmicks but with plenty of emphasis on the actual food. They have at least one more location now, at 13th and Walnut, very close to my hotel and the RTM. The gelato is very expensive – a medium, roughly 3/4 cup of gelato, cost $6.15 with tax – but outstanding quality. I got three flavors, figuring that was almost an obligation to my readers: dark chocolate, coconut, and toasted almond. The almond was a waste, as the gelato itself had almost no flavor; it comes with toasted slivered almonds, but the flavor needs to be in the gelato, not on it. The coconut was ultra-smooth with a strong, clean coconut flavor. The dark chocolate stole the show, probably the darkest, richest chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had, with a thick consistency more like cocoa pudding ice cream than a typical chocolate gelato; a medium cup of that might be overkill, but I’m willing to risk it.

I didn’t eat at any concessions at CBP, but it’s worth mentioning that the press box food was, by press box food standards, impressive. The worst part of eating while traveling is how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables while sticking to quick, inexpensive places, and the CBP press box had cups of fresh fruit, a basic salad mix that wasn’t brown or wilted or dried out, and a few vegetable side dishes each night. I know this isn’t of much use to the majority of you, but I wanted to give credit to the Phillies for doing a nice job.

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→ September 2, 2009
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Yankee Stadium eats.

I’ll be on ESPN 710 in LA at 1:12 pm PDT today, and on Mike & Mike tomorrow morning at 9:25 am EDT. I posted a piece on five interesting prospects recalled on Tuesday. I also appeared on AllNight on ESPN Radio last night.

I am not impressed by the food at Yankee Stadium. You build a $1 billion ballpark in the greatest eating city in the country – at taxpayer expense, of course – and you put in Johnny Rockets and Nathan’s and Famiglia Pizza? There’s virtually nothing local. The breadth of cuisines represented in the city where you can find food from any country where they eat food is dismal. And I only found one item there there I’d actually recommend*, the steamed dumplings at the noodle bar in the third base food court. They were superb, not heavy, not over-gingered (I like ginger, but a lot of restaurants go a little berserk in the dumplings), and steamed perfectly. You get four for $6, which wasn’t quite enough for lunch, but two servings would have been overkill.

*Okay, I lied, they have Carvel, which, for those of you outside the northeast, is frozen custard that rivals anything I’ve had in Wisconsin. It’s overpriced, and you can get it just as easily outside the Stadium, but yes, I had some, and you probably should too.

I went to the Lobel’s stand for a $15 steak sandwich, which seems to be the consensus “best food item in Yankee Stadium.” I don’t really have a problem with paying $15 for good beef; beef is expensive, and it should be, because cheap beef is nasty to eat, bad for the environment, and really bad for the cows*. But this sandwich was boring as hell – the steak had absolutely no flavor of its own, it was drowned in some undefined sauce, and, worst of all, it was tough. I’m no aficionado of steak, but one thing I know is that good steak should not be tough. Either it wasn’t cooked right, or it wasn’t carved right, not that I could tell under the tsunami of brown stuff on top.

* Okay, beef production in general is bad for cows. Just go with it.

That’s the good and the bad; here’s the ugly. Zeppole are the Italian version of fried dough – thick blobs of yeast-raised dough deep-fried until crispy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and then doused with powdered sugar. If you grew up in New York and ever went to an Italian feast, you probably love them as I do. What they serve at Yankee Stadium and call zeppole should get the concessions people arrested. They’re tiny, tasteless, and, worst of all, fried before the game. It’s a ballpark. You have deep fryers at full blast all around the place. You can’t fry a few zeppole to order? If they’re not going to do it right, they should just take it off the menu entirely.

I did have one meal in Manhattan on this trip, breakfast at Good Enough to Eat at 83rd and Amsterdam, recommended by a few readers, including a couple of NYC sportswriters. I asked the girl behind the bar what I should get, and she suggested the four-grain blueberry pancakes, which sounded good since 1) I like pancakes 2) I like blueberries 3) “four grain” makes it sound all healthy-like. They were fine, nothing special, and including a few stray blackberries, which I’m assuming was an accident rather than a gift from a Keith Law fanboy in the kitchen. The pancakes themselves had a faint cardboard-y taste of whole wheat – common, but avoidable – and they were a little overdone and dry, and probably shouldn’t have left the kitchen like that, although it takes a lot more to get me to send a dish back and waste the food.

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→ August 24, 2009
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Denver eats.

There’s a short blog entry on Troy Tulowitzki’s surge from Saturday night on my ESPN blog, with another just filed this morning.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2 and 2:30 pm EDT and possibly on 710 AM in Los Angeles around 12:40 pm PDT.

Denver rocks. What a great downtown – I probably walked six or seven miles in the three days, hopped the free shuttle on 16th a few times, and had a few good meals. I love downtown ballparks where there’s an actual downtown around the park, and Coors Field has a lot going on in the area. (The presence of many clubs nearby meant quite a bit of postgame eye candy walking the other way up Blake Street, a nice bonus.)

I got four different breakfast suggestions from readers but only one was really walkable from the hotel (I didn’t rent a car) – Snooze, on Larimer, very close to the stadium. Three of you recommended it and I can see why, as their food is very fresh and they make some excellent, funky pancakes.

I went twice, and the pancakes are clearly the main attraction. The first day, I got the ginger-peach pancakes, which had diced local peaches and crystallized ginger in the batter and a topping of streusel (just a little) and ginger butter. The second day, I went with eggs, chorizo sausage, hashbrowns, plus one whole wheat-blueberry pancake with sunflower seeds, maple syrup, and blueberry butter. Both types of pancakes had a great, light texture, with lots of big air pockets and a complex flavor. The whole wheat ones were either from a mild sourdough batter or made with buttermilk, probably the latter. The peaches, unfortunately, weren’t fully ripe and ended up bitter after cooking, but I imagine on a better day they’re pretty outstanding. They also do a pancake of the day; Sunday’s had white chocolate chips in the batter, which sounded too much like dessert to me.

My first meal at Snooze came with a bit of entertainment. I was seated in one of the five chairs at the counter, and the seat to my right opened up, at which point a woman asked me if anyone was sitting there and I told her no. She proceeded to sit there to make a call on her cell phone but didn’t actually order anything, so after five minutes or so, the host told her she couldn’t sit there. A little while later, she sat down to eat in the chair to my left, and before she’d finished the process of sitting she asked me which pancakes I had gotten. It was downhill from there:

Me: The ginger-peach pancakes.

Her: What kind of peaches are they?

Me: (reaching over, opening her menu, and pointing to the entry for the ginger-peach pancakes.) It’s all right there.

Her: Yeah, but I want to know what kind of peaches they are.

Me: I don’t know. Why don’t you check the menu?

Her: But are they canned peaches?

Me: I don’t know.

Her: I just want to know if they’re canned peaches.

Me: Ma’am, I did not actually make the pancakes. I’m only eating them. Perhaps you should ask someone who works here?

Her: How could you be in such a bad mood? It’s too early to be in a bad mood.

Oh, it gets better. She had already ordered breakfast to go, but then, just as it was coming out, she decided to sit at the counter and made them take the pancakes she ordered out of the portable container and put them on a plate, which seemed petty and wasteful. Then she ordered a sampler of two or three other kinds of pancakes – like I said, these are huge – and tried the one she originally ordered, the whole-wheat blueberry pancakes, which come with maple syrup already on them. And that set her off again.

Her: Why does it come with the syrup already on the pancakes?

Server: That’s how we serve that pancake here, ma’am.

Her: But the pancakes get soaked. The syrup makes it too sweet. You know that maple syrup is mostly sugar!

Server: Ma’am, it says on the menu that it comes with maple syrup on it. [To be fair, the menu wasn’t explicit about this.]

Her: You should never serve it on the pancakes already. You should serve it on the side.

Server: Well, that’s how we do it … here.

When I went back on Sunday and sat at the counter, the server (a different one), asked if I’d been there before, and I said yes, the previous morning, and I was sitting next to a crazy woman. At which point he said, “Oh, you must have been sitting in that same chair, and she was there (pointing to her seat).” Apparently, she’s a regular, and she’s always batty.

That day-two server actually tried to coax me out of my EMP + a pancake order, saying, “You can get three eggs anywhere. I think what you really need is a benedict,” and he’s right in that they do have a half-dozen options of eggs and hollandaise. I’m not a big hollandaise guy anyway – I respect any chef willing to make it because it’s time-consuming and finicky, but I find it extremely heavy – and Snooze’s hollandaises all contained either cream cheese (which I don’t care for) or smoked cheddar (which I despise), so while a few of those options looked great (like the one with smoked pork), I didn’t see the point of getting a benedict-hold-the-hollandaise. He was right, though – the eggs etc. were on the boring side and the hashbrowns were undercooked, with nowhere near enough crispy brown parts.

When I went to Long Beach earlier this month, I had sushi at Koi over in Seal Beach and sat at the sushi bar. A guy sat down next to me and clearly had been there a few times, so I asked if he was a regular, and he said he had been for years but had since moved to Denver. So we chatted for a while, and I told him I was there on business, I was a sportswriter, loved food, etc., and he said, “Wait, what’s your name?” Turns out he’s not a reader, but a friend of his is, so I pointed Gabe (the guy I was sitting next to) here and asked him to shoot me a note with some Denver food rec’s. He suggested Sushi Sasa, which turned out to be one of the best sushi places I have ever been to. It was a solid 20-minute walk from the hotel, but I got a spectacular view of the river as I crossed over the bridge to get to Platte St, and the food was well worth it.

Sushi Sasa is kind of trendy-looking inside and they do plenty of gussied-up rolls and overwrought appetizers, but if you go there for nigiri or sashimi, the fish is amazingly fresh, easily rivaling that of good West Coast or NYC joints. Sasa’s daily specials menu mentioned that two of the fish had been flown in from some specific market in Japan that day, and they make their own unagi (barbecued fresh-water eel), which I’m told (by some of you, I believe) is unusual, as most places buy it already cooked and just reheat it for service. The maguro tuna was the best I’ve ever tasted and the salmon was close. The seaweed salad was a bit of a rip at $8 and came with some very fresh but unnecessary vegetables on top (e.g., one asparagus spear, cut into 2″ lengths), but it was interesting to see three different kinds of seaweed instead of the standard one, including a burgundy variety I’ve never had before that was slightly bitter and didn’t have the tooth of the more typical, green-and-clear kind. (Sorry, I’m not up on my seaweed terminology.) Even the green tea was good.

(By the way, I’m a piker in the kitchen compared to Gabe, who chronicles some of his cooking exploits on his blog, including making his own duck prosciutto.)

My one other stop was a minor indulgence, as I am a bit of a sucker for local fast-food burger joints and saw one called Good Times across the street from my hotel. It’s not Five Guys or In-n-Out, with a bigger menu and fries that aren’t hand-cut, but for a fast-food option it was two or three steps above the McDonald’s/BK class of “only if I’m desperate and even then I’ll think twice” establishments. The toppings at Good Times were also very fresh – bright green lettuce that still crunched, thick slices of juicy and faintly sweet tomatoes – and the beef (100% all natural Coleman … do I even want to know what 80% natural beef has as its other 20%?) was better than the bland, generic fast-food burgers forced down our throa… Sorry again, CSPI just hacked my blog, but I’m back. It’s a solid fast-food burger. The fries are coated, which I don’t really like, but they’re seasoned and not over-salted; skip the “wild sauce,” which is just barbecue sauce mixed with mayonnaise and is the color of terra cotta. Good Times also serves frozen custard, which I tried the night before, although they only do two flavors a day, vanilla and a special flavor, which was strawberry on Saturday. The vanilla had a good custard texture, and the mild flavor was nothing a little hot fudge couldn’t fix.

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→ September 30, 2008
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Milwaukee eats (+ TV, radio).

TV today: ESPNEWS, 4:10-4:30 EDT as part of the Insider segment with Jerry Crasnick.
Radio: Northsound 1380 AM, Everett, Washington, with the Fish, 5:30 pm PDT. Also, ESPN 540 Milwaukee, Wednesday, 11:15 am CDT (streaming available online).

I have to say that I underestimated Milwaukee, figuring I was headed into a culinary wasteland filled with fat people who eat brats and drink pale beer all the time. It was actually one of the best eating towns I’ve been to all year, especially in the very funky area between Brady Street and North Street west of Prospect, which is definitely where I’d live if I moved there and could stand winters cold enough to turn your testicles necrotic.

First meal might have been the best – lunch at Cempazuchi on Brady Street. It’s sort of an upscale twist on Mexican food, with a heavy dose of authentic Mexican dishes mixed in. I started with the sopa de lima, a clear soup with chicken, lime juice, and tortilla strips, and then ordered the pork “torta,” Cempazuchi’s term for an unusual sandwich on pan frances with avocado, jalapeño, and onions. Both were phenomenal. The soup had just the right balance of acid, salt, and a touch of heat, and had obviously been assembled seconds before it reached the table. The sandwich was filled with pulled pork, apparently smoked properly since it wasn’t dry and didn’t require a sauce, and came on soft bread that had been sliced and grilled. The sandwich also came with a half-hearted garden salad with sliced radishes and an indeterminate white dressing. The meal starts with two salsas, one that was “peanut-based” that had an odd texture (shocking), and another with roasted tomatoes and garlic that was too thin but had a great smoky flavor.

Saturday’s breakfast was at Beans & Barley, a combination café and natural foods store just off North Street. There was no pork on the menu, so my EMPT included chicken sausage, which was cooked to death and mostly inedible. Everything else was excellent, particularly the breakfast potatoes, new red potatoes sliced and roasted with rosemary. The café serves Rishi teas (rhymes with “chichi”), but their only black tea is Earl Grey. It comes in a big ceramic pot with a strainer inside filled with loose tea, but it was already dark and bitter the moment it reached the table, meaning that it had been brewing too long. The properly-made scrambled eggs and the amazing potatoes still make it worth a trip.

I hit up a reader suggestion for Saturday dinner, Pizza Man, across the street from Beans & Barley. That’s where I had my lone beer of the trip, an ale from New Glarus with a fruity taste and medium body; I prefer darker beers, so this probably wasn’t the best choice, but it was their only local beer on tap. For dinner, the pizzas looked like they had the proper crust but were overtopped, so I went with one of the recommended specials, wild boar ravioli in a marsala sauce. The ravioli were excellent; I’ve never had boar before, but the flavor of the ravioli was very much like bacon. The sauce, on the other hand, was bitter with a pretty clear note of alcohol, meaning that it wasn’t cooked enough. The dish came with this amazing light garlic bread, not greasy at all and perfect for absorbing sauce, if you wanted the sauce absorbed. Pizza Man also has a huge wine list, and the décor – Old World Dungeon – reminded me of a place my wife and I visited in Siena almost ten years ago, an upscale “medieval” place called Il Gallo Nero.

Milwaukee being the center of the frozen custard world, I had to make sure to hit a few spots while I was on the ground. (Frozen custard is a style of ice cream that relies on egg yolks for texture, as opposed to “Philadelphia” ice cream, which contains no eggs and uses more butterfat.) Of the three places I tried, Gilles, Leon’s, and Oscar’s, Gilles wins the overall prize for the best combination of flavor and texture. All three places had very smooth custards, and Leon’s probably was the smoothest of all but both the chocolate and vanilla were timid, particularly the chocolate. At Gilles, I went with the flavor of the day, “turtle,” which had caramel and pecans mixed in and maybe a tiny bit of fudge. The vanilla flavor still came through in the custard, and the texture was just a shade below Leon’s. Oscar’s “mud pie” – allegedly mocha custard with hot fudge and Oreo knockoff cookies – had the worst texture, just slightly icy, and the knockoff cookies weren’t very good, but the custard did have a strong chocolate flavor.

I also approve of the Milwaukee Public Market, which is a fairly small building that houses maybe a dozen merchants, from a produce stand to a real fishmonger to a spice house to a few stands selling prepared foods. If I lived in Milwaukee, I’d be there all the time. The coffee-shop in the Market, the Cedarburg Coffee Roaster, roasts at least some of its coffees right there at the stand, which was a positive sign for their espresso. A double espresso macchiato (they don’t sell singles) runs $2.75, and while the beans were obviously fresh, the espresso was underextracted, resulting in a powerfully sour shot; the most likely explanation is that the barista used more grounds than necessary for the pull. It was a waste of what I think was pretty good coffee.

I also went to The Soup & Stock Market and ordered a bowl of their chicken and dumpling soup, which included real hand-made dumplings (obviously pinched out of dough by an actual hand) and was based on their own homemade stock (available frozen for purchase if you don’t want to make your own stock at home). The soup was very good, if just a little underflavored, filled with dumplings and chicken and vegetables; the stock was a bit on the light side, but it had the great mouth-feel you only get from soup made with stock. The soup also came with a hunk of a pretty amazing dense white bread. I also bought a bottle of Haley and Annabelle’s Vanilla Root Beer, brewed by two girls aged 10 and 5, with proceeds going to their college education fund. It was at least solid-average, better than any national brand, with a dark color, deep root beer flavor, but probably a little more sugar than I’d like. It’s behind, say, Thomas Kemper’s (my gold standard), but I admit I was sucked in by the story and the cause.

The one dud meal was breakfast at Miss Katie’s Diner, an old-school greasy-spoon near Marquette’s campus. Absolutely everything was drenched in butter, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The hash browns were soggy from frying in so much grease, the toast was buttered so heavily that I could see through it, and the eggs ended up sitting in the grease that was on the plate. There were definitely better options out there for Sunday breakfast.

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→ July 25, 2008
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Soft-serve ice cream.

Callum sent along this great New York Times article on the evolution of soft-serve ice cream:

Young chefs around the country, with fond memories of Dairy Queen stands and Mister Softee trucks, are remaking soft-serve ice cream, with epicurean takes on traditional ingredients as well as some things never before seen spiraling out of an icy nozzle, like saffron, bourbon and jalapeño flavors.

At Sketch Ice Cream, a shop in Berkeley, Calif., boysenberry, balsamic Bing cherry, white peach and strawberry are the soft serves of choice this month; vanilla is always available.

I grew up with and am still totally partial to Carvel ice cream, one of the original soft-serve ice cream vendors. Carvel’s product is technically a frozen custard because it contains egg yolks, although it turns out that it also contains mono- and diglycerides, which come from natural sources but aren’t strictly necessary for a good soft-serve product. That won’t stop me from eating Carvel, since it tastes great and still has the best texture I’ve ever had in soft-serve ice cream, but maybe it’s time for me to branch out a little.

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