→ April 5, 2023
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Arizona eats, March 2023.

Belly Kitchen & Bar’s downtown Phoenix location (they also have one in Gilbert) is easy to miss – it looks like a house and is located on a tiny lot on the southeast corner of 7th Ave & Camelback. The menu is influenced by Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisines, and the dishes are all supposed to work with the wine & cocktail menu, although I admit that usually after one cocktail I’m not ober enough to make that connection. Anyway, I ordered the bartender’s two main suggestions, the crispy spring rolls and the pan-seared king trumpet mushrooms, as well as their rum and rye old fashioned. (Two of them, as it turned out.) The mushrooms were the more interesting of the two, tossed with some small cubes of tofu and served in a black bean and Sichuan peppercorn sauce that was faintly sweet, a little spicy, and very earthy with a ton of umami from the fermented beans. The spring rolls were a very good exemplar of their type, served with large lettuce leaves, mint sprigs, and nuoc cham sauce for dipping, although it was nothing I hadn’t had before, just generally not this good. And, somewhat unfortunately for the purposes of this blog, that was all I could eat – I was full, and just left wistfully eyeing the plates my neighbors got. I really wish I’d had room for the jackfruit and mustard green fried rice in particular.

Pizzeria Virtù is the second outpost from Chef Gio Osso of Virtù Honest Craft, although he’s also now opened a third place, Piccolo Virtù, so I’m behind. The pizzeria is more than just a pizza outlet, with an assortment of fresh house-made pastas and traditional Italian plates as starters. I went with my longtime friend Bill Mitchell, whose words and photos you may have seen over at Baseball America, and we did one item from each section – their insalata with arugula, grape tomatoes, red onion, shaved Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and a lemon-olive oil dressing; the pizza with ‘nduja, a spicy sausage from the Calabria region of southern Italy; and their rigatoni with tomatoes, basil, prosciutto, and more Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The pasta was by far the best dish we got, cooked truly al dente with bright sweetness from the tomatoes and basil and exactly the right amount of salinity even with two very salty ingredients in the prosciutto and the cheese. The pizza was solid, more Neapolitan-adjacent than Neapolitan, without a ton of air in the outer ridge of the crust but saved by the high quality of the toppings. (They also misspelled ‘nduja on the menu, writing “n’duja” instead, which is only funny because it’s an Italian term.) The salad was a good salad, nothing more or less, but I’m also glad we didn’t get something heavier. I can also vouch for the amaro viale cocktail, a combination of bourbon, three different amari (potable bitters), and sweet vermouth that hits like a negroni but with the smoothness of the bourbon rather than the herbal notes of gin.

Sweet Dee’s Bakeshop is on East Stetson not too far from Old Town, focusing mostly on pastries and sweets. Their breakfast sandwich comes with a scrambled egg, bacon, avocado, and goat cheese on a croissant, and was solid to very good other than the common problem of the egg being cooked more than I like it. I usually stick to the classics when I have breakfast out there – Hillside Spot, Matt’s, Crêpe Bar, sometimes Snooze – but this was excellent for something faster when I had a morning game to hit.

Futuro Coffee has been on my to-do list for Phoenix for years now, at least going back before the pandemic, as its adherents have argued it’s the best espresso place in the Valley. They certainly do take their espresso seriously, with a single-origin option each day, and the standard options to take it with varying degrees of milk. The day I went, the single-origin was an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, which in my experience does not play well with dairy; I asked the barista his advice and he said he thought it was best black. It’s served in a wide terra cotta cup, unlike any coffee vessel I’ve ever tried, which did keep it warm for longer than ceramic would, along with some sparkling water. Futuro is located inside the Palabra art gallery and the space is very cool, weirdly sparse and yet comfortable enough to sit and write for a while. They’ve used a number of top roasters from around the U.S. and Canada, including heart and 49th Parallel.

Fire at Will is in a relative wasteland for good food, up at Shea and Tatum, an area that’s mostly populated by chain restaurants. Their menu is eclectic, to put it mildly – I have a hard time seeing what the core idea is here, or finding any unifying theme among the dishes. I heard the folks sitting next to me ask the bartender if there were any must-try dishes on the menu, and the bartender recommended … the burger. That’s not a great sign, at least in my experience. I tried just two things given how large the portions are – the fried Brussels sprouts and the Iberico ham croquettes. The Brussels were truly outstanding, served with nuoc cham (fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar), chopped peanuts, and a little diced Asian pear; I’ve had a lot of fried Brussels sprouts but this was among the very best, as there wasn’t a single leaf that was overcooked and nothing was too undercooked to eat, while the sweet-sour sauce had the right balance to offset any lingering bitterness in the brassicas. The croquettes were also extremely well-cooked, very crispy on the outside but smooth and still soft on the interior, although I didn’t taste the ham at all, which is a colossal waste if they used real jamón iberico.

I ate one meal down in Tucson after my game at Hi Corbett Field, stopping at El Taco Rustico on N. Oracle on my back to I-10. It looks bare bones but the food is anything but – their carnitas is outstanding and the pollo asado has a ton of flavor, although it paled next to the pork since it’s just inherently less fatty. They also offer four vegetarian options (nopales, rajas con queso, eggs, or summer squash) as well as the fifteen meat or meat-containing choices for fillings. The guacamole starter is pretty generous for $8, with house-made chips, probably not something I needed but I ordered it anyway for the sake of my readers. Chef-owner Juan Almanza opened the restaurant right as the pandemic hit and kept it open with the support of the community during that first year, although now it appears that he’s built a strong following on his own.

I had two bad meals on the trip, one unsurprising and one less so. I ate at Revolu Modern Taqueria near the Peoria Sports Complex, mostly due to time constraints, and it was exactly what I expected, a chain restaurant’s facsimile of tacos, including “diablo” spiced shrimp that a toddler could eat. I also went to my longtime favorite FnB and had by far the most disappointing meal I’d ever had there, for reasons I can’t even completely explain. I’ll just note that the “smoked” salmon salad, which the server highlighted as a favorite, came with salmon so overcooked I couldn’t eat it. I’m not sure if it was smoked or poached, but it was beyond chewing. Maybe I just caught them on an off night.

The rest of my meals were at places I’d tried before, like the breakfast spots mentioned above, plus Republica Empanada, Pane Bianco (which now serves New York-style pizza on some days), Cartel Coffee, Press Coffee, Lux, Frost Gelato, and Defalco’s Italian Market. All lived up to previous standards.

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→ March 29, 2023
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Winston-Salem and Wilmington eats.

Mission Pizzeria Napoletana near downtown Winston-Salem isn’t just a pizzeria, but a full trattoria with house-made pastas and other incredible dishes made from scratch in the tiny cooking space behind their counter. My daughter was along for the ride on this trip, which meant I got to try a few extra items. We ordered the arancini starter, a special for that day that might have been the best version of this dish (balls of risotto rolled in bread crumbs and quickly deep-fried) I’ve ever had; the pizza with smoked mozzarella & tomato sauce; the rigatoni with tomato and cream; and the dessert special, zeppole, the Italian version of beignets. The pizza was outstanding – I’m pretty sure they use Bianco tomatoes, and the dough was perfectly light and airy around the edges with a thick outer crust and thin (but not wet) center. The pasta was truly al dente and the sweetness of the tomatoes shined through; I’ve come around over the course of my life on so-called ‘pink’ sauces, as just a small amount of cream is enough to bring out the sweetness of good tomatoes. The zeppole came in a paper bag filled with powdered sugar, which brought back memories of going to Italian festivals as a kid on Long Island, although the zeppole I ate at those festivals were never this soft or moist in the center. I can’t recommend this place highly enough.

Bobby Boy Bakeshop is a French boulangerie and patisserie that had a line out the door when we stopped there while driving around the Wake Forest campus’ west side. They offer some very impressive old-world breads, including $3 baguettes, and a real coffee and tea program. We just had some sweet treats – my daughter loved the coconut cake, which was very intensely flavored and actually not overly sweet – so I can’t vouch for the savory items, although they do offer a rotating sandwich of the day on their own bread.

Krankie’s is a popular breakfast spot that also roasts its own coffee beans, offering a Tanzanian peaberry the day I was there (you can’t buy it on their site) that had the slightly sweet berry notes typical of that country. My daughter and I each got breakfast sandwiches on biscuits and once again she defeated me, getting the special with chicken, pesto, and tomato, while I got the Yeti with eggs, house-made sausage, and tater tots right on the sandwich, drizzled with maple syrup. The sausage was the disappointing part, actually, as it was way overcooked, and the biscuit itself wasn’t as good as what I can make at home, but the coffee was very good if brewed a little too hot. It looks like those two places are the best options for craft coffee in Winston-Salem.

Chill Nitro is right downtown and offers ice cream made to order with the help of liquid nitrogen, offering an incredibly smooth product because the nitrogen freezes the ice cream base so quickly that the ice crystals remain very small. They also offer the option to add a shot of alcohol to your ice cream for $6, although I passed on that; alcohol also inhibits freezing but I didn’t think it would be necessary and I wasn’t interested in drinking right before the drive back to Charlotte. I had the peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cups and a peanut butter drizzle, and it was indeed intensely peanutty with an outstanding texture.

I also went to (other) Wilmington to see Walker Jenkins last week and had one meal there, eating dinner at Savorez, a Latin American/Southern fusion place in a cute space with funky décor. (I wanted to try Seabird, but they’re closed on Tuesdays.) I went with the shrimp and grits, served with a chorizo gravy, goat cheese polenta, black beans, oven-dried tomatoes, and pea shoots. The idea of the dish was better than the execution, as the polenta itself wasn’t very hot and the chorizo gravy – which would have been great on biscuits – overpowered the flavors of just about everything else on the plate. The shrimp were actually quite good on their own, which meant deconstructing the dish was the best option.

I rolled into town earlier than I expected, so I stopped in Bespoke Coffee to sit for an hour or so, which is a very cool café/bar with a wide range of tea options (I don’t drink coffee that late in the day unless I have a migraine). I can’t say much about the booze or coffee offerings but I absolutely loved the space and would definitely end up working there often if I lived in downtown Wilmington. Well, that Wilmington, not mine.

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→ March 16, 2023
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Charlotte & Columbia eats.

Amelie’s French Bakery & Café is a Charlotte chain of … well, French bakeries and cafés, shockingly enough, and they’re really good across the board. My daughter was with me on the trip, and since we got there around 11 am, she had lunch for breakfast, going with the chicken/pesto/goat cheese sandwich, while I had an egg sandwich with bacon and mushrooms on a croissant. Mine was good, but my daughter talked about her sandwich for two straight days, saying she’d have eaten it again the next day with no hesitation. I can also recommend the chocolate éclair, the macarons (my daughter says the cotton candy and blueberry cheesecake were her favorites, while I’d suggest the café au lait and pistachio), and the key lime tart. I could do without Amelie’s kitschy décor, which reminded me way too much of the France pavilion at Epcot. This is what someone who’s never been to France might think France looks like. I’ve been to France. It’s a lot less tacky. But this is definitely French patisserie.

Milkbread is one of the buzziest new restaurants in the Queen City, but it was probably the most disappointing meal we had on the trip. We both got breakfast sandwiches on biscuits; hers was fried chicken while mine was sausage with a chilled “jammy” (barely hard-boiled) egg. None of this really worked because the biscuits fell completely apart when picked up, and in the case of my sandwich, the egg halves just kept sliding out – just slicing it would have at least solved that one issue. But I found the cold egg and hot sausage/biscuit combination offputting, and while my daughter’s sandwich was better, certainly, it needed something else besides just the chicken on it – maybe pickles, for example.

Inizio is a mini-chain of Neapolitan-style pizzerias around Charlotte where you order at a counter, making it a good option for a quick meal. They have a typical set of standard pizzas, but my daughter and I love pasta alla vodka, so we went with their monthly special, a pizza with vodka sauce, fresh mozzarella, and a drizzle of pistachio-basil pesto. It well exceeded my expectations for such a casual atmosphere – both the sauce and the pesto had big flavors, with the pink vodka sauce clearly cooked beforehand to remove some of the alcohol’s bite (I’ve had pizzas where they don’t do this, and so you get the unpleasant bitterness of the booze), while the dough was solid-average for a Neapolitan place, with good texture and some light charring but not the light airiness of the very best Neapolitan pizzas I’ve had. We split a Caesar salad which was forgettable, mostly because the dressing might as well have come from a bottle.

I met this baseball writer named Joe Pos-something who said he has a new book coming out in September for lunch at Banh Mi Brothers, right by the UNC-Charlotte campus. I am far from an expert on banh mi, and I say that in large part because I have liked just about every one of these Vietnamese sandwiches I’ve ever tried. This was a 50/55 for me, with the bread not exactly a true French bread but with a crust that crackled and shattered like it should, while the chicken and other toppings were all solid if maybe a little underseasoned. It’s a chain-restaurant wasteland out there by the university, so if you’re headed that way this is one of your best bets to do something local that’s also pretty light (at least compared to all the other options).

I tried two coffee places – Not Just Coffee and Undercurrent, both serving beans from local roaster nightswim, with the cup I tried at Undercurrent the slightly better of the two. That was a Wilder Lasso Gesha from Colombia, an anaerobic, double-washed bean grown at about 2000 feet above sea level. It had some black cherry and dark chocolate notes with a pleasant tartness that was less acidic than beans from East Africa. Not Just Coffee had a washed Finca La Planada from Costa Rica that had less pronounced flavor notes. Undercurrent had three pour-over options, while NJC only had batch brew available.

I had one meal in Columbia, South Carolina, as I drove in for the Gamecocks’ Saturday night game and then drove back to Charlotte that evening. I shouldn’t be that surprised to find interesting restaurants in big college towns, but I didn’t expect to find an authentic Korean restaurant that specializes in bibimbap right in downtown Columbia. 929 Kitchen & Bar serves Korean cuisine, including bibimbap, udon, japchae, and samgyupsal-gui (grilled pork belly), as well as Korean fried chicken in various forms. I had the bibimbap with tofu and a small selection of the fried chicken wings, opting for the non-spicy versions of both – I do like spicy foods, including kimchi, but I also understand my limits. That was probably my one mistake with the bibimbap, as I missed that heat, and the fact that the vegetables served on top were neither cooked nor pickled meant that the whole dish was bland, even with the soy-based sauce. They also serve the egg hard-boiled, rather than serving it raw and allowing the heat from the stone bowl ($1 extra) and the rice to cook it, which is a shame. The chicken wings were spectacular, though. If you do go, I recommend getting the spicy sauce with the bibimbap, or just ordering more of the fried chicken instead.

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→ March 5, 2023
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Minneapolis eats, 2023 edition.

I spent the weekend in Minneapolis at the Cambria College Classic to scout potential first-round picks Jacob Gonzalez (Mississippi), Matt Shaw (Maryland), Enrique Bradfield, Jr. (Vanderbilt), and Hunter Owen (Vanderbilt), along with the enigmatic right-hander George Klassen, who was bounced from Minnesota’s rotation after two starts where he averaged two walks per inning, but hit 99 in a relief appearance on Saturday night. Anyway, that’s a different post. This is a roundup of what I ate.

I met friends for dinner at Tullibee, a fine-dining restaurant in the Hewing Hotel right downtown, which was certainly the meal of the trip. We shared a few small plates and then I got one main, which was the only dish that wasn’t excellent. The caraway potato rolls come warm, with butter soft enough to drink (I don’t recommend this), although the presentation in a wooden box with a sliding glass lid is a bit silly. If I’m going to pay for bread, this is the quality I expect. The kale & date salad with almonds, celery, midnight moon (a Dutch goat cheese), and an orange vinaigrette was a solid take on the rather played-out kale salad, although I confess I still like kale salad quite a bit and find it very satisfying for something that’s extremely healthful. Midnight moon is one of my favorite cheeses, so that didn’t hurt. The wood-fired carrots with a scallion labneh beneath and a brown butter-sage finish were probably the best thing I tasted there, with that perfect taste of the fire to contrast with the sweet earthiness of the rainbow carrots. The one slight disappointment was the cassoulet, which I love because it contains duck confit, and if I see duck confit on a menu, I’m getting it. I don’t care what else is on the menu, just take it, I’m getting the duck confit please and thank you. Unfortunately, it was a little overcooked – since that’s cooked ahead of time (that’s what the confit process is, poaching the duck legs in duck fat for up to 24 hours at a very low temperature, so overcooking is more or less impossible), I assume they heated it too much or for too long to serve it. I also thought the sausage, which came whole, was too salty. I ordered their house Negroni, which replaces the Campari with the French herbal liqueur P31, so the drink is the color of mouthwash. It’s less sweet and less overtly bitter than a traditional Negroni, so while I wouldn’t say I like it better than the classic, it worked on its own merits.

My other dinner on the trip was at Billy Sushi, which is a very trendy restaurant that hides some very good quality fish under the veneer of what is basically tourist sushi – bizarre rolls with too many ingredients, wacky starters, and, in this case, way more Wagyu beef than any sushi restaurant should have on its menu. (They have at least two items that come with raw Wagyu that’s torched right before serving. It’s very showy.) The red snapper was probably the best of the six types of nigiri we tried, impeccably fresh and tasting of the ocean, while the bluefin tuna was about as soft as the butter in that bread dish at Tullibee. (I don’t typically order bluefin, since it’s being fished out of existence, but it came in the combination plate we ordered.) Of the non-nigiri food we tried, the shrimp po’ boI, which is actually just diced shrimp breaded, quickly fried, and tossed with masago, plum sauce, and a Thai chili aioli, was the best item, as the shrimp is just barely cooked, which is the opposite of what I associate with fried shrimp at just about any place you get it. The dish was perfectly spiced for me, with the occasional big hit of chili to remind you it’s there. The hot si-fu salad, which is cold but is supposed to be spicy, was perfectly fine but not spicy, and I’d rather try something else from the extensive menu – or just get more raw fish.

Vivír is an all-day bakery, market, and café attached to Centro in northeast Minneapolis, serving Mexican and Mexican-inspired dishes for all three meals. I got the chilaquiles verde, which is one of my favorite breakfast dishes to get anywhere, and their version comes with tortilla chips that have softened slightly from the spicy salsa verde, along with shredded chicken, radishes, queso fresco, and tangy crema. I would have gone lighter on the crema, which overpowered the other flavors in the dish, since the fat in it tends to mute the effects of chili peppers on the palate (which I assume is why it’s there). I’d love to go back and try several other things on the menu – they have duck carnitas tacos on the lunch menu, and as stated above, I can’t pass that up.

Farmers Kitchen and Bar was my lunch stop on Friday, walkable from U.S. Bank Stadium and next to where the Mill City Farmers Market is held on Saturday. Their fried walleye sandwich, called “The Shore Lunch,” was incredibly light for a fried anything, with the fish still flaky and moist. The sandwich comes with tomato, cucumbers, tartar sauce, and pickles on the side, while the menu said the roll was ciabatta but I think it was different the day I went, as I thought it was brioche or some similar enriched bread. It’s an all-day café that does breakfast and weekend brunch as well as a full coffee bar.

Speaking of coffee, I tried Spyhouse, one of the two main third-wave roasters in the Twin Cities, since I’d already been to Dogwood before. Spyhouse has seven cafés, one in Rochester and the others in Minneapolis or St. Paul, and I went to two of them – the one in the Emery Hotel downtown and the one in Northeast Minneapolis on Broadway. The first one is charmless because of the hotel, but the second has the vibe I want in a bustling coffee shop, with plenty of space to work and hang out. I tried their Gisheke drip coffee from Rwanda and the Finca Monteblanco from Colómbia, buying a bag of the latter to bring home; I liked both but the Gisheke was so hot when I got it that I missed out on some of the typical characteristics of Rwandan beans (they often taste of stone fruit, with light acidity that’s less than Ethiopian/Kenyan). The Finca Monteblanco is very smooth with some chocolate and caramel notes, enough so that I’ll run it through the espresso machine too at some point.

I did revisit two places I’d been to on previous trips. I first ate at Hell’s Kitchen in July of 2006 and have been back at least twice since then, and it’s still excellent, although when I went on Friday they were struggling with service despite very few customers. (I assume they’re short-staffed, like most places, but on this morning there seemed to be plenty of people on the floor.) I got what I always get, the regular waffle with coarse cornmeal mixed into the batter, and the maple pork/bison sausage, and while I concede it would be rather hard for any dish to hold up to memories from nine years earlier, the waffle came pretty close. Due to some confusion in the kitchen, I got to try the lemon-ricotta waffle as well, but I think I just don’t like that flavor combination – there was nothing wrong with it, and I know most people love lemon-ricotta breakfast dishes. I also went to do a little writing at Patisserie 46, about 15 minutes south of downtown, to work for a bit, and that place hasn’t changed a bit – it’s a real French patisserie and boulangerie, and since I was one of the very last customers as they closed, they gave me (and a few other lucky guests) a free baguette they would otherwise have had to toss.

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→ February 21, 2023
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Dallas eats, 2023 edition.

My trip to Dallas didn’t involve many meals worth discussing, since I was mostly at the ballpark in Arlington (and ate stadium food, something I very seldom do, for good reason). Most of my food journeys involved coffee, as it turned out, with two very good spots near my hotel in downtown Dallas.

Stupid Good Coffee actually lives up to its name, serving beans roasted by nearby third-wave roaster Oak Cliff Coffee, with the drip coffee I had on Friday their Honduras El Puente (according to what I could see, at least). They also do a lot of ridiculous, sugared-up drinks that mask the coffee itself, but they’re at least using the right beans to start with. It’s a small shop in a small shopping area inside an office building next to the Renaissance on Elm St., but with just one employee on Friday – I know it’s hard to find staff now – the service was slow.

Weekend is another tiny shop, this one tucked into the Joule boutique hotel, serving coffee from Counter Culture – in this case, another Honduran offering from El Puente, so quite likely beans from the same wholesale lots. Weekend does pour-overs, which is the better option as their drip coffee is actually brewed too hot, while they also have espresso drinks and some small food options, including some prefab breakfast tacos and real croissants. Every hotel needs a café like this one.

I had two meals of note on the trip. One was at Angela’s Café, an all-day diner in the Bluffview neighborhood that serves Mexican-American cuisine. I went there for breakfast with my alter ego, who just happened to order exactly the same thing I did – chorizo and eggs with hashbrowns. It’s a simple dish but one of my favorites, and not something I ever see on menus up where I live. Angela’s’ version was excellent, although I’m also willing to accept that the eggs in this are always cooked more than I like, and their hashbrowns were perfect other than that they needed more salt (but I almost always think that, don’t I?).

The other was a quick bite between games from Flying Fish, a local chain serving Cajun-influenced seafood dishes. Their shrimp po’ boy was … fine, nothing special. The shrimp definitely weren’t as fresh as they could have been, but I would have also consumed an entire bag of the hush puppies that came with it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat at a Flying Fish, but it’s certainly better than eating anything in that ballpark.

I did get what I thought was pretty solid Mexican-American food from a place called Fernando’s, close to Angela’s, as some friends ordered dinner from there before they all came with me to the Saturday night TCU-Arkansas blowout, but my friends said there’s much better Mexican-American food to be had in the area and this was just the closest option. Of course now I’m going to leave more time on the next trip to make sure we eat at one of these better places.

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→ July 22, 2022
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Los Angeles eats, 2022 edition.

I’ll start with the two remarkable meals I had in Los Angeles, starting with Pizzeria Sei, which has already received quite a bit of good press for their incredible “Tokyo-style Neapolitan” pizzas. I had the funghi, with fior di latte, several types of mushrooms, entire cloves of garlic, pecorino, oregano, and thyme. This might be in the top five of pizzas I’ve ever had, from the ingredients to that incredible, airy dough, perfectly baked, just a little charred on the edges and spotted on the underside. I did take the garlic cloves off before eating it, because I am a 49-year-old man who will sweat garlic out of my pores for two days if I eat all that, but the garlic/thyme flavor combination is one of my favorites to have with mushrooms – and those were exceptionally high quality, with cremini, shiitake, and I’m pretty sure porcini on there. I would eat any pizza these folks make given how good the dough is.

Sushi-Tama was my splurge meal for the trip, which I think I earned after we got through ten rounds. It’s one of those sushi places where the fish arrives daily on planes from Japan (and, as my server informed me, elsewhere around the world) and where the staff all pronounces everything as if they’re native speakers. I stuck to nigiri and a mozuku seaweed salad, which was itself unlike any other seaweed salad I’d ever had. It wasn’t bright green and vaguely briny, but dark olive (I’ve had that before) and extremely vinegary. Enough about the seaweed, though … the fish was comparable to the best I’ve ever had. I would especially recommend the kinme dai, golden eye snapper served with a little lime zest and salt. Its slightly higher oil content gave it more flavor than the madai, true snapper that was one of the daily specials. I also tried the nogoduro, fresh sea perch that they serve lightly seared, a new fish to me; the anago, salt-water eel; and the medium-fatty tuna, which the server actually recommended even over the much more expensive, fattier tuna cut. Twelve pieces of nigiri plus the seaweed salad was under $100, which I think is a bargain by L.A. standards.

Tacos Baja was my first meal after landing, Enseneda-style tacos, burritos, and other dishes mostly revolving around fried shrimp and fish. I kept it simple, getting two fish tacos with beans and rice. The fish was baja-style (of course), very crispy with a beer batter, served with a giant amount of shredded cabbage, salsa, and white sauce. There was so much stuff on the taco I could barely fold the thing, but the important part is that the fish was good and perfectly fried so it stayed moist in the center. I probably should have skipped the rice and beans and tried another taco. They have three locations, one in LA proper and two in Whittier.

Ronan on West Melrose is a pizzeria with a bunch of small plates and three other mains on the menu, although I was just there for the pizza. Ronan’s dough is actually lighter and fluffier than Sei’s, or really any Neapolitan place I have tried – enough that I’m not sure you’d even call it Neapolitan any more, although it’s still great, just too airy for that style. I had the Sweet Cheeks – guanciale, ricotta forte, and black pepper honey. It was sort of a salt-and-pepper bomb, although that was good after I’d been out at the Futures Game for several hours. The dough was the real star, though. I felt like I just had delicious salty bread for dinner. With a little bacon. It turns out that the owner of Pizzeria Sei previously worked at Ronan, although I think he’s surpassed his former employers.

Angry Egret Dinette is set back in a courtyard off Broadway in the Old Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, so it’s not visible from the road, which meant I drove past it twice before just parking and walking to find it. This Beard-nominated spot has a large patio seating area and a take-out window, offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with inside seating available at some point in the past but perhaps not currently. I went with their shrimp po’boy, fried shrimp (and a lot of them) with cabbage slaw, salsa negra, pico de gallo, and avocado. Salsa negra is made from chiles mecos, a type of chipotle pepper, which is itself a dried and smoked jalapeño; mecos are ripened for a longer period, giving them a deeper red color, and then smoked for a longer period as well. To make salsa negra, you fry the chiles mecos in oil for several minutes until they turn dark brown, and then add garlic, salt, sugar, at the very least, with some recipes calling for vinegar, cumin, other spices, even soy sauce. Whatever Angry Egret uses, my Italian-American palate was not ready for that heat – this was very spicy, delicious, but whoa boy that was hot. The shrimp were quite fresh and fried just enough to cook them, still tender throughout. I liked this combination of flavors but I can’t pretend I tasted everything with my face on fire.

One breakfast spot to recommend – Aroma Tea & Coffee, which offers a smoked salmon “stack,” their take on a benedict that replaces that awful Canadian ham product with smoked salmon and replaces the English muffin with a crispy potato pancake. I’ve had this combination before, including over at Square One in LA, and I’ll never not order this if I see it on a menu. The salmon here was solid, which is the main differentiator – if that’s not up to par, the whole dish fails.

I did try two coffee places recommended by a friend in the specialty coffee business. Kumquat, over in Highland Park, brings in specialty coffees from small roasters all over the country, and focuses on espresso rather than brewed coffee, although they do offer a drip coffee each day. They do a daily blend for their regular espresso and a single-origin espresso that changes daily. I love the space, but there’s no indoor seating at the moment, just a shaded patio. They also offer some baked goods; I enjoyed the blueberry cornmeal scone, which was nice and crumbly and not too sweet, so it didn’t overpower the coffee. Go Get Em Tiger has multiple locations and a sizable food menu, although I just had a drip coffee, their Ethiopia Yukro, a tart, fruity coffee that’s less citrusy than beans from other Ethiopian regions that I’ve tried. They don’t have wifi, if you’re curious, which did matter as I was trying to work on draft recaps by that point, although I still recommend the coffee.

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→ May 16, 2022
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Arkansas eats.

I visited my 50th state this past weekend, checking Arkansas off the list, reaching a goal of hitting all fifty before I myself turned 50. (The last ten, in reverse order: Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Hawai’i, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana.) I was in northwest Arkansas to see the Razorbacks host Vanderbilt, and have to say I was quite impressed by the depth of the food scene, the amazing Crystal Bridges art museum, and a much more progressive culture than I anticipated.

As for food, getting to Onyx Coffee was also a major goal for me whenever I got to northwest Arkansas; they’re a nationally renowned third-wave roaster whose beans I first tried in Louisville at Gralehaus. I went twice to the Bentonville location on the main square, which is also how we stumbled into the wonderful farmer’s market there on Saturday morning. Onyx does all the coffee drinks you could want, from pour-overs of single origins (they had one for $14 that I did not try) and espresso drinks to things with coffee and lavender that I simply can not abide. The coffee is amazing, though.

After Friday’s game, I went to Dickson Street and tried Los Bobos Taqueria, a late night (6 pm to 3 am) place that makes street tacos with 8-10 different filling options. I went with the shrimp and chicken, both of which were excellent, although I’d take the shrimp (which came with its own sauce) over the chicken (which was fine, but the meat was a little drier). Other options include al pastor, chorizo, cochinita, and veggie. They also have about ten sauces/salsas available on the counter, including a peanut-based one that had a hell of a kick at the end. They don’t have a working phone number but they are open.

Saturday, I ate at the Razorbacks’ ballpark, where Wright’s BBQ provides the food at the first base concession. Wright’s only opened its doors in October of 2017 after Jordan Wright, a former Tyson Foods employee, tasted Salt Lick BBQ in Austin and went on a whole barbecue tour of the state so he could open his own place back home. I always assume concession places like this lose something compared to the restaurant’s own site, but I can at least tell you the pulled pork at the ballpark didn’t even need any sauce – it was still moist enough (despite being smoked elsewhere and transported to the stadium) and had enough flavor on its own that I skipped the sauce entirely. I’m nobody’s BBQ expert but that’s a bellwether for me.

Pressroom is right next to Onyx in downtown Bentonville, offering lunch and dinner as well as brunch on the weekends. I had the chicken “sammy,” blackened chicken on a Hawai’ian bun with pickles, slaw, and mayo. They make the buns in house, and it was actually the best part of the sandwich – I thought it was brioche, even though Hawaiian buns have quite a bit less fat than their French cousins.

Some quick hits: Ozark Mountain Bagel is across the square from Onyx/Pressroom, and while nobody’s confusing this with the actual New York item, their bagels are pretty good, better than what you’d get at any chain … Susan’s “Internationally Famous” Restaurant in Springdale clearly has its devoted local following but it was pretty ordinary, and the biscuits were truly nothing special … Vault is a cocktail bar near the university campus with a very extensive bourbon collection and menu of classic cocktails and extremely ornate house cocktails with things like torched rosemary and acidulated oligosaccharide. It’s a cool spot but I was insufficiently cool to try one of their more complicated house cocktails, instead going old-school with a New York Sour.

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→ April 20, 2021
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Charlottesville eats.

On my way out of Charlottesville to drive home, I stopped at The Fitzroy, a gastropub in the city’s Downtown Mall, to grab dinner for the road. I went with their roasted broccolini and mozzarella sandwich, served on ciabatta with lightly roasted cherry tomatoes and basil pesto, which turned out tob exactly what I wanted – filling but not heavy, with a huge quantity of the star broccolini, which were roasted deeply enough to get some color and caramelization on them. The menu is small but has plenty of options for carnivores and vegetarians, and apparently they make their own tonic water for G&Ts, which I’d love to try when I’m not facing a 220-mile drive.

Al Carbon is a fast-casual Peruvian chicken place up Seminole Trail about 3 miles north of campus, serving the standards of that cuisine as well as some Mexican-inspired dishes like elote, esquites, and cemitas. I went with the basics – a quarter dark with maduros (fried sweet plantains) and elote con mayonesa (corn on the cob, rolled in mayo, cotija cheese, chile powder, and lime zest). The chicken was good but the least interesting thing I ate; it was still juicy but the bulk of the flavor was on the skin, not in the meat. The plantains were absurdly good, slightly crispy and chewy at the edges, but bordering on custardy at the center, while the elote was spicier than what I’m using to having in that dish, but in a good way. Al Carbon also shares a parking lot with a Kohr Bros. Frozen Custard stand, if you’re so inclined. I was.

MarieBette is a small French bakery that the internet told me does great breakfast sandwiches, which seemed like an ideal thing to eat on the go. Their croissants are divine, flaky and buttery with barely enough flour to hold the whole thing together, and I definitely ate it while it was still too hot. They do a full coffee service as well, but I skipped that to go check out JBird Supply, a small coffee micro-roaster with a shop in a shared office space that serves pour-over, drip, and espresso options from a small selection of their own beans. They seem to focus on small growers who provide for their workers or communities, whether it’s Uganda, Ethiopia, Guatemala, or anywhere else where they source their beans. I tried their Ethiopia Sidamo as a pour-over, which was less overtly citrusy than the typical Ethiopian coffee, and picked up a bag of beans from the Gorilla Summit station in southwestern Uganda, near the border with Rwanda. The latter have a powerful black cherry aroma the moment you open the bag, and the coffee from it has the same note but with some nuttier undertones.

I didn’t get to visit my favorite dinner spot in Charlottesville, Mas Tapas, as its hours conflicted with the game time Friday and I wanted to hit the road as soon as I could on Saturday. I did get a quick to-go meal from Moe’s Original BBQ right near the UVA stadium; it’s a regional chain of passable barbeque, but I think their collard greens are very good, just spicy enough, salty but not too much so, and their ‘marinated slaw’ is vinegar-based rather than mayo-based, which I prefer. You can do better in Charlottesville if you have the time, though.

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→ April 6, 2021
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DC & Maryland eats, 2021 edition.

I made a trip! To see baseball! Two trips, in fact, but only one involved a hotel stay, as I went down to the University of Maryland and stayed rather than boomeranging back and forth to Delaware (it’s a short drive but often a miserable one). For the first time in over a year, I have some restaurants to report on, in DC and the Maryland suburbs.

Mandalay is a local legend, a Burmese restaurant in Silver Spring. I don’t think I’d ever had Burmese food prior to this, so I have nothing to which I can compare this meal, but it was both spectacular and a truly new experience. We ordered four dishes: the eggplant fritters, the green tea leaf salad, nanjee thoke, and shrimp with sour mustard. Nanjee thoke is a noodle dish with curried chicken strips, onion, and cabbage, tossed with Burmese dressing, a mixture of peanuts, sesame seeds, horse gram bean powder, and fish sauce; the latter two ingredients are fermented, and both high in glutamates, the source of umami flavors. Sour mustard is also a fermented dish, a Burmese analogue to kimchi or sauerkraut, made from mustard greens and fermented with ginger and a salt brine. Those two dishes were like nothing I’d ever eaten. Both start out with a funky front note of something fermented, something slightly off, but then the umami comes out, along with sweet/spicy flavors in the noodles and tangy flavors in the shrimp (with a lot of onions that give a hint of sweetness), so that when you finish a bite, you can’t wait to have the next one. The fritters were custardy inside, and came with a very potent sour and spicy dipping sauce that paired well with the fried eggplant but also came in handy for the salad, which was woefully underdressed, with neither enough salt nor enough acidity. The next time I get mustard greens from our CSA, I’m going to try to replicate the sour mustard pickle, though.

Call Your Mother is a mini-chain of “Jew-ish delis” that make some incredible bagel sandwiches, which start with some damn fine bagels. I got the Sun City, an everything bagel with eggs, bacon, and spicy honey. That last element could easily have overwhelmed the sandwich, but there was just enough to give the sandwich a little kick and to give the bacon that sweetness you might get from “accidentally” letting it sit in the maple syrup that slid off your pancakes.  My wife got the Gleneagle, a za’atar bagel (already interesting) with candied smoked salmon cream cheese (even more interesting) and cucumbers. They use coffee from Lost Socks Roasters, located just over the line in DC’s Takoma Park neighborhood. It is a Jacob Wohl-certified Hipster Coffee Shop™ and it’s also excellent – if I’d thought of it, I would have grabbed a bag of beans – but I had their espresso at their shop and a drip coffee of a custom blend they make for Call Your Mother. 

Franklins Brewery is a restaurant, a brewery, and one of the coolest general stores you will ever find – the food is fine, the beer is good, but go for the store, which has all manner of eclectic, weird, and interesting knickknacks and gifts (as well as various craft beers). They make a solid crab cake, and the pork in their Cuban sandwich is tangy and smoky, but if you’re eating here, try the beer; I enjoyed the Rubber Chicken Red, an American Amber with very little hoppiness, but would also recommend the Highland Hugh (a Strong Scotch) and the HVL (a Honey Blonde, maybe a bit sweet for fans of IPAs or other hoppy beers). The store even has a small but well-curated selection board game collection, including several Ticket to Ride and Catan titles and a nice selection of the single-play Exit games. The outdoor seating area was a plus – I’m not vaccinated at all, so I’m still not eating inside any restaurants – and I imagine it’ll be packed the moment the weather warms up.

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→ March 31, 2019
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Arizona eats, 2019 edition.

The larder & the delta was in the now-closed Desoto Central Market food hall, but has since reopened in its own space and I think it’s going to be a standby for me when I’m in Phoenix and looking for something more vegetable-forward than most of the restaurants out there. The menu draws inspiration from southern cuisine, but vegetables are more front and center than meat. My friend and I got four dishes, all from the small plates sections of the menu, including the can’t-miss vegetable beignets, which are stuffed with mixed vegetables and are huge, airy, and just faintly sweet, served with green goddess foam, a black garlic-mustard topping, and some ‘vegetable ash’ that is just for show. The hamachi crudo with citrus, herb oil, and some not very spicy Fresno peppers was also superb, almost entirely because the fish itself was so fresh – citrus is a great complement to hamachi but this fish was good enough to eat with just a pinch of salt. The hoe cakes – a type of savory, unleavened pancake that traces its roots to slaves in the American South (and likely beyond) – come with a house-fermented chow chow (a type of spicy pickle, like a chutney) and a celery leaf salsa verde, which brings the same kind of contradictory sensation as the beignet: you associate the starch with sweet flavors, and here you get acidity and heat and a slightly heavy base from the density of the cakes. My least favorite dish, although it wasn’t any worse than average, was the baby beets salad, with more citrus, escarole, fennel, and almonds, which I think suffered because it has such a muted profile compared to the other dishes. The new space is small, but with quite a bit of seating on the patio and a long bar where we ended up sitting, and they do happy hour specials from 3-6 on weeknights that looks like pretty good value.

Fellow Osteria has a menu designed at least in part by Claudio Urciuoli, now running things at Pa’la and formerly of Noble Bread/Noble Eatery, with an emphasis on fresh pastas, some made in-house and some imported, as well as pizzas and a few very traditional southern Italian plates. Their charcuterie plate includes sopressata, speck (smoked prosciutto), three cheeses, basil pesto, peperonata, and flat breads, all good but I could have taken that entire bowl of peperonata and drank it like a shooter. The orecchiette di grano arso, one of the pastas they import from Italy, is a traditional Apulian pasta made from ‘burnt’ wheat that is toasted, providing a nutty, caramelized flavor, cut with some untoasted wheat so the finished product will still have enough gluten to hold together. Fellow serves theirs with a slightly spicy sausage from Schreiner’s, a local purveyor, and broccolini; even with the big flavors of the sausage, this dish is about the pasta itself, which was perfectly al dente and also had a very satisfying, deep semolina flavor that tasted more complex than regular white pasta.

Restaurant Atoyac Estilo Oaxaca has been a bit of a white whale for me since I lived there; like its previous incarnation, Tacos Atoyac, it’s a bit out of the way of my travels for work, not very close to any ballpark except maybe Maryvale, without nothing else nearby that would bring me to the area. They do very simple, no-frills, authentic Oaxacan cuisine, with superb homemade tacos. There’s a lot of red meat here, which is a minor limitation for me, but I did fine, getting three tacos, one with chicken, one with shrimp, and one with fried fish, as well as sides of rice and refried beans, which proved more than enough for me – I could have skipped the beans, but when in Rome, etc. I’d get all three again, but the shrimp was probably the least flavorful of the three (I concede that shrimp is hardly a Phoenix staple), and I was pleasantly surprised at how much flavor the chicken had, given how much that meat is an afterthought at restaurants that focus on beef. That said, if you eat cow, they have beef cooked many ways, including asada, al pastor, lengua, and more, and also offer burros and other plates beyond tacos. Atoyac’s location is a little hard to find – I drove right past it – without a ton of parking, and it’s a barebones spot, but clean, which is all I really ask of a restaurant.

The Normal is actually two separate restaurants in the Graduate Hotel in Tempe, on Apache, close to ASU’s campus, and their new menus incorporate some dishes from the couple behind Tacos Chiwas and the just-closed Roland’s (more on that below). The morning I went to their diner for breakfast, they were out of the fresh flour tortillas required for some of their dishes, and their take on chilaquiles, with a salsa rojo, had a solid flavor profile, with a little heat and a strong earthy flavor from whatever pepper (maybe a red New Mexico?) it included, but the dish needed far more of the sauce to keep it from drying out.

I didn’t get to Bri this trip, unfortunately, but that was ‘next’ on my list of places I wanted to try. I visited a few old favorites, including FnB, which is still my favorite high-end restaurant out that way; Soi 4; Noble Eatery; the Hillside Spot; and crepe bar, which now has a sweet crepe with sunflower butter, grilled figs, bananas, and coconut flakes that is delicious and so filling (that’s a lot of fiber) that the first day I ate it I didn’t need lunch. Roland’s Market closed shortly before I got to Arizona, although the location has already been converted into a new, larger outpost of Chris Bianco’s Pane Bianco, while also serving coffee and breakfast, open from 8 am till 3 pm. I also got word that Giant Coffee, one of my favorite spaces in Arizona, has switched to using beans roasted by ROC, a local roaster whose coffees are way too dark for my tastes, which is a huge disappointment, so I stuck to Cartel and crepe bar (now using Tucson’s Presto) for coffee on this trip.

 

You can find some of my previous Arizona food posts here: from March 2018,  one writeup from May 2016, from March 2016, and my 2016 Cactus League dining guide, a bit out of date but still mostly relevant.

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