My trip Albuquerque last week was my first visit to the fine state of New Mexico (43 down, seven to go), and one I was really looking forward to because of its reputation for outstanding chili pepper-based food. Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen first turned me on to the existence of a whole new cuisine within the borders of the U.S., and I’ve been dying to get out there. Granted, Santa Fe was my first choice, but the game in question was in Albuquerque.

I only ended up hitting two places for four meals – more on that in a moment – but both places were hits. Frontier Restaurant is apparently something of a local icon; it’s open 24 hours and works from the not-always-successful strategy of giving large quantities of food for a low price. The food at Frontier really is outstanding, and it’s fast and cheap. I can’t see how any fast-food joint within five miles stays in business. For dinner – twice – I went with an enchilada plate with the “green chile stew” topping, which is apparently the mildest of the three offered (the others being red chile sauce and chopped green chiles). For $7, the dish includes two enchiladas, rice, and two fresh flour tortillas. It was enough food that on my second night there, I ate that full meal around 6:30 and still wasn’t hungry when I got on my redeye five hours later. I did try the guacamole on the first night, but it was kind of bland and was puréed smooth – not my favorite style.

Their breakfast is what really set them apart. I hadn’t originally intended to go to Frontier again for breakfast, but the place I’d picked out, Perea, was closed for three days that week, and when I stopped into the Flying Star nearby, the menu looked very … corporate. So I kept driving and ended up back at Frontier, which turned out to be a huge stroke of luck. I went with the #1 special – two eggs (scrambled), meat (carne adovada – hey, when in Rome), hash browns, and tortillas – plus a side of pancakes, which you can order by the flapjack. The pancakes were to die for – buttery, fluffy, and not at all like the leadcakes you get at most chain restaurants and even some mom-and-pops perpetrating breakfast fraud on unsuspecting diners. The hash browns were almost like a rösti, with a crunchy brown crust on the outside but soft and moist potatoes on the inside; they could have used more salt, but that was easily remedied. The only misses were the carne adovada, which was extremely acidic and wasn’t really hot in temperature – mind you, I’m no expert in that genre – and the coffee. I ordered tea and didn’t realize I had coffee until I took a sip, which tells you something about how weak it was.

The one other meal was Monday’s lunch, when I headed west to El Charrito at 4703 Central Ave NW. (Props to Dan McKay, a poster on McCovey Chronicles, for suggesting this place.) The menu is simple – seems to be a theme out there – and the service was excellent. They had no problem preparing one of their combo plates – a tamale, an enchilada, and a taco – without cheese for me, which is usually a great sign because it means everything’s made to order. Despite that substitution, the food still came out pretty quickly, with the tamale and enchilada served Christmas style (red and green sauces). The taco was good, straightforward, just served as ground beef in the shell so you can fix it as you’d like. The tamale was a little too spicy for my Northeastern (read: untrained) palate, but the pork inside was delicious. The enchilada wasn’t quite as good as Frontier’s, with the chicken tasting a little blander to me, but was otherwise fine. The green sauce was definitely the less spicy of the two. The dish was also served with fresh sopapillas and a big squeeze bottle of honey. I left full. The one negative on El Charrito came when I left – the counter was covered with political stickers and pamphlets, all left-leaning and mostly anti-Bush. I don’t care how these people vote or what their beliefs are, but I don’t want to be assaulted by it while I’m eating there. Food and politics don’t mix, because the politics invariably spoil the food.

Anyway, sorry for the long lag between posts, but with the draft over I should be writing a little more frequently.

So last Monday, my wife and I headed into Manhattan – I had a scheduled TV appearance and she wanted to hit a fabric store in Soho. We decided to have lunch and headed to Mario Batali’s Otto Pizzeria, which promised authentic, Italian-style pizzas, an enormous wine list (wasted on me, but I thought I’d mention it), and – according to at least two things I read on line – the best gelato in Manhattan. The pizza could be Velveeta served on cardboard for all I care, as long as there’s real gelato on the premises.

Unfortunately, the experience ended up reinforcing for me why I tend to avoid celebrity-chef restaurants. The food was a disappointment, and the menu was too heavily influenced by the chef’s whims, not by the food itself. It surprised me to run into this at a Batali restaurant; one reason I like his shows and his books is that his agenda seems to be a noble one: to celebrate regional Italian cuisine using authentic recipes and ingredients.

We ordered a funghi misti appetizer – mixed wild mushrooms marinated in herbs and garlic, delicious, earthy, and reasonable at $4 for close to a cup’s worth of ‘shrooms. I went with the pizza of the day, a pesto pizza with fresh mozzarella. Pesto genovese is made with basil, which doesn’t take heat very well, so pizzas made with pesto typically are cooked partway before a thin layer of pesto is added. Instead, I got a pizza with a thin crust (not as thin as the ones I’ve had in Italy) and a thick layer of bitter pesto that tasted like it contained spinach rather than basil (I asked – the waitress said there was no spinach in it). There was also very little cheese, so I was eating a cracker with bad pesto on it.

My wife’s entrée was better, as she ordered spaghetti carbonara. The pasta was really al dente – I’m all for some tooth to the pasta, but even I would have left this in the water another sixty seconds – and the sauce was done right. The one problem was that the dish was extremely salty, probably the result of the huge amount of pancetta in it.

As for the gelato … we didn’t have any. The dessert menu came – it took forever, now that I mention it, and the service in general was inattentive at best – and the list of flavors read something like this: olive oil, vanilla, pistachio, coconut, ginger, hazelnut straciatella, mint chocolate chip. I might have forgotten one, but you get the idea. Notice anything missing? That’s right – nothing chocolate or coffee. Not even tiramisu-flavored gelato, which was in every gelateria I visited on my trips to Italy. At $7 for three scoops, those flavors weren’t enough to get me to stick around.

So I kind of got dragged to the South End, which might as well be the other end of the earth for me, last week by a couple of friends, one of whom was on furlough (his wife and one-year-old son were on a plane back from California at the time). The destination was Toro, a be-seen tapas bar created by Ken Oringer, the chef behind Clio and Uni in Back Bay – in other words, a really famous chef around these parts.

Anyway, the food at Toro was impressive. The best dish, one that Ming Tsai raved about in a review I found after we ate at the restaurant, was a grilled maize dish. The cobs are seared to the point where the outside of the kernels is starting to blacken, after which it’s rolled in a garlic-mayo (tasted like butter was in there too) and topped with a crumbling of cotija cheese, which I didn’t even know I liked. Other hits included the shrimp in a mildly spicy butter sauce, a braised short rib served in a tiny cast-iron skillet, bacalao croquettes (a little soft inside, but not fishy, with a perfectly fried exterior) with a ring of deep-fried lemon rind, and boquerones (marinated fresh anchovies).

There were a couple of misses, of course. The skirt steak was bland and a bit undercooked (we asked for medium, it was still mooing when it reached the table). The pimientos de padron were very bitter, which was a big disappointment because it was my first time trying them after reading about them in Calvin Trillin’s Feeding a Yen. The pan con tomate was fine, but it was just bruschetta with a Spanish name, nothing I couldn’t have in any decent Italian restaurant (not that we have that around here).

I’m told the wine list at Toro is solid, for what that’s worth, but since I drove downtown I didn’t partake.

I left not hungry, but not exactly full, for $30 or so, which doesn’t strike me as a great bargain, but is typical of my experiences at tapas places. I’m not a huge eater, but the tiny little plates never seem to add up to a full meal. So if you like tapas or want to go to a restaurant with a scene, Toro’s worth the trip, since the food itself is good. I just like a little more bang for my buck.

On the culinary front, Atlanta was disappointing – five restaurants, the best of which was one I’ve been to many times, and two of which were big disappointments.

The Flying Biscuit is a bit of a local legend, apparently, but I’d been warned that it wasn’t as good as it was in its heyday. Given how I feel about biscuits, though, I thought it was worth a shot, especially since the one thing I expected them to still do well was the food item that appears in their name. No such luck: The biscuit was tasteless and even a bit flat, with a dry exterior and a doughy interior. Nothing else on the plate stood out, and I was a bit put off by the fact that the menu includes no pork products of any kind. It’s breakfast, kids. Bacon comes from a pig. Don’t insult me by trying to make it out of poultry.

On the other hand, the biscuits at the Silver Skillet, over by Georgia Tech, were excellent – light, fluffy, buttery (maybe a bit too much so – seriously, just brush the tops, don’t douse them), and you get two of them with your eggs and pork product. The eggs (scrambled) were nicely cooked as well. Some other online reviewers seem to like the décor, but I found it kitschy, and they get a point or two off for serving food-service tea.

Two separate rankings (one by CitySearch) put Williamson Bros. Bar-B-Q at the top of Atlanta-area barbecue joints … which doesn’t say much for Atlanta-area barbecue. (J.C. Bradbury, of Sabernomics blogging fame, told me later that day that Atlanta has no good ‘cue. Figures.) I went with a combo plate – ribs (which turned out to be spare ribs), pulled pork, fried okra, BBQ beans, and a slice of toast. The ribs were so tough that I gave up after one. The pulled pork was better, nice and moist, but really light on flavor; they get bonus points for including some end bits in the mix. The okra was greasy, and the batter didn’t include the traditional cornmeal. The BBQ beans were actually quite good, with a fruity flavor I couldn’t identify (I’m thinking apple juice, but I’m not sure). I’d go back for a plate of pulled pork or a sandwich, but a Q place that can’t do ribs doesn’t belong at the top of any rankings.

Back over by Georgia Tech, I walked from the park (a top-notch college facility) up to the Tin Drum Asia Café, which theoretically is a quick food option. I say theoretically because it took over 20 minutes from when I placed my order for me to get my very simple lunch, which I don’t believe they started making until I complained that it was taking so long. To make matters worse, the food was nothing special: The coconut soup with chicken (tom kha gai) was bland, and the shrimp tempura “drumroll” (a couple of fried shrimp with avocado, tomato, and a honey-miso dressing on a small roti) was greasy. I can see why the student body likes it, though – all that plus a bottle of water was under $10.

Finally, the best meal I had on the trip was an old standby: Annie’s Thai Castle in Buckhead, which I’ve been visiting on trips to Atlanta for about twelve years now, and it’s still as good today as it was when my friend Steve first took me there. Their pad prik with beef was the highlight of this visit – spicy but not incendiary, with extremely tender strips of beef – and their pad thai is always solid. We also had their chicken with yellow curry, which was very good, not too sweet the way a lot of places serve it. You also get plenty of food at Annie’s, which is important, since I was eating with a scout who has two hollow legs.

Not much new food-wise on this trip – just two new restaurants that I managed to hit while otherwise stuck in chain-restaurant hell. Line Thai, on Bell Road in Sun City, jumped out at me as a non-chain place, although it’s not exactly a hole-in-the-wall either, with a big, brightly-lit dining room and a pretty extensive menu.

Anyway, I went for the pad thai (spelled phat thai on their menu), and also added a “salad” the Thai name of which I can’t hope to remember. It was actually a dish of finely chopped chicken that had been sautéed with lemongrass, mint, chili powder (just a little), and scallions, and was served with cilantro and with sliced green cabbage wedges. It was good, not great, with a pleasant but mild flavor that unfortunately didn’t do enough to disguise the plain taste of the chicken. The pad thai was excellent, with an earthy sauce, shrimp that didn’t taste like they went from the freezer to the wok (which happens way too often, even in “good” Thai joints), and a nice hit of spice from what I presume was either chili powder or a chili sauce.

The big hit of the trip was a relatively new gelateria in Scottsdale called the Gelato Spot, on the corner of 3rd Ave and Scottsdale Rd. This is the newest of the chain’s four locations, and the gelato was very good. The texture was excellent, smooth with no granularity found in a lot of cheaper gelato places. They do keep it very cold, too much so, so that it was harder than the gelato you’d get at a really top-notch gelateria or at any gelateria in Italy. The chocolate flavor was superb, not too sweet with a nice cocoa flavor, while the caramel flavor was fair with a weird sour undertone, almost like a cheesecake flavor.

Let’s just get one thing out of the way first: Downtown Houston is something of a disaster, at least over by Minute Maid Park. That area is particularly decrepit, with abandoned buildings ringing the stadium. I walked across the street from my hotel to the ballpark, but didn’t feel safe walking anywhere else in that part of town. I drove up to Market Square in search of a restaurant that turned out to be closed for dinner (it’s only open three hours a day, 11-2 – great business model), and that area is also ringed by abandoned buildings, not to mention the ultimate feel-good establishment, the bail bondsman, which I passed on the way there.

Azuma is a high-end sushi joint in the Market Square area, and by high-end, I mean that only one person who worked in the place spoke Japanese, and the restaurant was more about ambiance and selling booze than it was about the fish. But unlike most of the other restaurants I saw in a walk around Market Square, it was open, had customers, and didn’t look like a front for the Lithuanian mob or something. (Most ominous was the “Irish pub” that had one customer, a cop, sitting out front. In fact, the sheer number of cops I saw around Market Square made me wonder what the hell goes on around there that requires that many cops in a two-square-block radius.)

Anyway, Azuma’s food didn’t live up to its ambiance. I went with an “Asian mixed greens salad,” which was a mesclun salad with asparagus added, and enough dressing to drown a rhinoceros. Once I was done spattering dressing all over Market Square – you try eating vinegar soup with a pair of chopsticks – I turned to the sushi. The spicy tuna rolls didn’t contain mayo (bonus points), but the tuna itself was fishy, and the chefs hadn’t removed the blood-line portion of the fish. It was also too spicy for my tastes, but that did have the benefit of making me forget that it tasted fishy. The salmon was better and was clearly fresh, but didn’t have much taste of its own, lacking that slight sweetness that good sake should have. I also tried a fish called escolar, which had a good smooth texture but tasted something like Styrofoam peanuts. Add in one serving of unagi and the total came to over $30.

Friday morning I headed to a restaurant featured on The Hungry Detective, a Food Network show aimed at finding “off the beaten path” restaurants and a new addition to my Save-Until-I-Delete list on the Tivo. The Breakfast Klub is just what the name says – a breakfast joint that serves up eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles (with fried chicken wings, the house specialty), and what I have to say is the best breakfast biscuit I have ever had. The thing was pillow-soft, almost like cotton candy, with a tremendous butter flavor and just a hint of a buttermilk tang. Seriously, a box of those vs. a box of Krispy Kremes … wars have started over dilemmas like that. (I’ll take one box of each, thanks.) I went back the next day to try the waffle, but was disappointed; although it was made on a Belgian-style griddle, it was a traditional batter, so the finished product was dense and a bit dry, and I was surprised that it wasn’t sweet. The eggs were good the first day but divine the second, cooked but not overcooked and still moist when they reached the table. I’d also take the country sausage (a little tough, but with outstanding flavor) over the bacon (nothing special). But the biscuits – seriously, I’d beat you to death with a butter knife over the last one.

The other pleasant surprise of the trip was, of all things, the restaurant in my hotel, the Inn at the Ballpark. Because the hotel and its Ballpark Café (okay, no points for the name) are right across the street from Minute Maid, it made a perfect spot for me to jump over, grab lunch, and get back during the one-hour breaks between games. And it turns out that the food there is very good, especially because they’re clearly using fresh ingredients for everything they make. At my first visit, I went for the default option, the grilled chicken sandwich (served with roasted red peppers on focaccia), and was amazed to find that unlike most grilled chicken breasts, this one wasn’t cooked within an inch of its life. It had a perfect brown sear on the outside, and the inside was fully-cooked but still moist. The shrimp BLT – I ordered the fried shrimp sandwich (which sounded like a makeshift po’ boy), but the waitress screwed up my order) – was also delicious, with shrimp that were also cooked properly, as well as sliced avocado and bacon. The restaurant makes its own potato chips, and I’d bet that the French fries were cut on-site as well.

The kicker for me was the Sunday breakfast, which is usually a disaster at good restaurants. I ordered off the menu – if you’ve read Kitchen Confidential, you know why – and went for the yogurt/fruit plate. I ended up with a 10″ plate full of fresh fruit, a dish of yogurt, and a blueberry muffin that had just been made. The waiter thought I was done with the dish with the last bite of the muffin on it, and I nearly broke his wrist to keep him from taking it. But what impressed me the most was the fact that the executive chef, Oscar Mejia, came out and manned the omelette station himself. I told him how much I’d enjoyed the food over the past few days, and he gave all the credit to the people who work for him in the kitchen.

One last note on Houston – while flying out of IAH, I grabbed a chopped beef sandwich at Harlon’s BBQ, the only non-fast-food chain dinner option I could find, and for a quick airport meal, it was pretty good; the meat wasn’t dry and didn’t taste or look like it had been sitting for hours. Out in the world I’d demand better, but by the low standards of airport cuisine, this was pretty good.

My wife and I recently got the chance to go out for dinner without our daughter for the first time in about five months, but neither of us was interested in heading downtown, so our options for a nicer meal were somewhat limited. We decided to try Porcini’s, an Italian restaurant in Watertown very close to our favorite little restaurant in the area, Strip-T’s.

It was a mistake.

The main meal was fair; my wife liked her veal saltimbocca, but my veal piccata wasn’t pounded thin enough and the sauce was very tart, meaning that it didn’t have enough butter to balance out the acidity. But the gigantic failure on Porcini’s part was their tiramisu, which we decided to split. It looked like it was done correctly, but after one bite each, we realized that the cheese-custard was sour. It overwhelmed the taste of the dessert, and I thought they might have skimped on the ingredients by using cream cheese instead of mascarpone (an imported Italian cheese that has a texture similar to American cream cheese, but a much milder and smoother taste). So I asked the waitress if there was cream cheese in it. She asked the chef, and came back to tell us that yes, the tiramisu contained a “mixture” of cream cheese and mascarpone (which I took to mean that it had 98% cream cheese and 2% mascarpone). I pointed out that that “wasn’t exactly traditional,” and she just shrugged her shoulders.

She didn’t take it off the bill. I took it out of her tip.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of any restaurant that cuts corners on ingredients. I don’t care how good your chef is; if the ingredients suck, so will the finished product. Porcini’s cuts corners on ingredients. That’s a dealbreaker for me.

My wife pointed out that we should have just gone to Strip-T’s, which is a much more casual, mom-and-pop type of restaurant that specializes in ridiculously fresh fish. We wanted to do something a little more upscale, but as often as not, upscale just means a higher price, not a better meal.