→ 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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→ March 17, 2019
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Florida eats, 2019 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 1, 2019
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Texas eats, 2019 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 15, 2019
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Top 25 restaurants in Philly for 2019.

I’ve wanted to put this post together for ages, but wanted also to be sure I’d tried enough restaurants in the city for my list to make some sense. I think I’ve done that now, although there’s always more to try, and living a bit outside the city I’m at a slight disadvantage.

1. High Street on Market (Old City). My favorite spot in the city for breakfast or lunch, and they do dinner as well, although it’s the one meal I haven’t eaten there. The menus are built around their amazing, old-world breads; the breakfast Forager sandwich is to die for, and they make the best roast pork sandwich in the city. Their sister restaurant, Fork, is also on the list.

2. Suraya (Fishtown). Recently named the #1 restaurant in the city by Philly magazine, this all-day Lebanese restaurant, with a café/market in front and fine-ish dining in back, does Levantine cooking right, with classic preparations of the mezze (small starters, like hummus and muhammara) served with piping-hot pitas. There are a few non-traditional items here too, but go with a gang and stuff yourselves with a bunch of mezze.

3. Vedge (Midtown Village). A vegan restaurant to satisfy almost any omnivore; they do incredible things with vegetables so that the dishes are satisfying and visually stunning, and so you won’t think about the absence of meat. I still can’t believe the sunchoke bisque amuse bouche didn’t have dairy in it, and the toasted marshmallows in my dessert were indistinguishable from those made with egg whites.

4. Bud & Marilyn’s (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s best-rated restaurant does American comfort food with upscale twists, including various fried chicken dishes and outstanding salads – I’ve recreated a fennel, brussels sprout, and green apple salad I had there in December 2017 a dozen times at home.

5. Cheu (Fishtown). I’d say “best ramen in Philly” but I haven’t had it many places. They do make great ramen, and have great cocktails. It’s near Suraya; parking is a pain on that whole stretch.

6. Hungry Pigeon (Queen Village). My birthday dinner last year was here, and we ordered a strange assortment of dishes, but everything was excellent (well, my daughter might disagree on the asparagus). They use fresh pasta from the Little Noodle Pasta Company, a spinoff of the now-closed Ela in the same neighborhood. The dessert, a ‘diner-style’ coconut cream cake, was four large portions by our standards.

7. Fork (Old City). High Street’s sister and neighbor does superb fine dining in a quieter, more upscale atmosphere, with a great wine/cocktail list.

8. Abe Fisher (Rittenhouse). I haven’t been to Zahav, Michael Solomonov’s flagship restaurant, but I’ve been here, which is still on the high end but more affordable and I think a bit more accessible. The menu is inspired by but not limited to Jewish-American cooking traditions. The gougères they serve instead of a bread basket are superb, and my daughter will tell you it’s the best Shirley Temple in the city.

9. Osteria (Fairmount). Osteria was a Marc Vetri restaurant, included in the sale of most of Vetri’s portfolio to Urban Outfitters, then purchased last year by the owners of Sampan and Double Knot. Most of their signature dishes, including house-made pastas and pizzas, are still on the menu, including the chicken liver rigatoni that my daughter once described as “it sounds gross, but it’s really good.” (She was 8.)

10. Royal Boucherie (Old City). Top Chef winner Nicholas Elmi’s second restaurant in Philly – I haven’t been to Laurel – is an “American brasserie” with a lot of French influence on the menu and a very lively bar. Their desserts are superb and they have one of the best lists of amari (potable bitters) I’ve come across.

11. Pizzeria Vetri (Arts District & Rittenhouse). I’ve only been to the original location, going many, many times since it first opened, and they do a small list of Neapolitan pizza options very well, as long as their signature rotolo, pizza dough rolled like a buche de noel with mortadella, cheese, and pistachios; as well as light, house-made soft-serve ice cream. Service here has always been excellent for a fast-casual spot.

12. Brigantessa (East Passyunk). Pizzas and house-made pastas from southern Italian peasant food traditions. They did have an issue last fall that resulted in the firing of their chef de cuisine, later than they should have, over anti-Semitic comments and mistreatment of staff.

13. Le Virtu (East Passyunk). Abruzzese cuisine – that’s east central Italy – which contains many dishes and ingredients you’d recognize as “Italian” but sometimes in different combinations. It’s a region I associate especially with mushrooms and that was indeed the pasta dish that most stood out to me when I ate there last month.

14. V Street (Rittenhouse). Vedge’s ‘vegan street food’ offshoot; the fried tofu taco with two slaws manages to deliver the satisfying crunch of a fish taco and make me forget I’m eating tofu, a food that I’ll consume but would rarely describe as memorable. I wish they were open more hours.

15. Royal Izakaya (Queen Village). An izakaya that takes its sake and shochu very seriously, with an intimidating menu of small plates to go along with the booze.

16. Amis (Washington Square). Another former Vetri outpost, amis focuses on the cuisines of Rome and the surrounding Lazio region in a quirky converted warehouse-like setting. When I went, I had two specials, both involving duck, that were superb.

17. Pizzeria Stella (Society Hill). A Stephen Starr outpost very close to I-95 and the waterfront, Stella does traditional Neapolitan-style pizzas with a few pasta and starter options and home-made gelato for dessert.

18. Barbuzzo (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s flagship, still known for great pasta dishes (the ricotta gnocchi are superb), good pizzas, seasonal vegetable dishes, and that salted caramel budino.

19. Stock (Fishtown/Rittenhouse). A BYOB with two locations – I’ve only been to Fishtown – that serves the best banh mi I’ve had here, as well as southeast Asian soups and cold noodle dishes.

20. Dinic’s (Reading Terminal Market). This is where you go if you want a very classic Philly roast pork sandwich (with sharp provolone and broccoli rabe, please). They do other sandwiches I don’t eat, but why bother?

21. Poi Dog (Rittenhouse). If you want poke, this is your place. They have spam musubi too if that’s how you roll.

22. Dizengoff (Rittenhouse Square). Solomonov’s hummus outpost, with shakshuka on the weekends, will often have a line out the door. His Federal Donuts is across the street but I don’t care for their donuts and haven’t tried their Korean fried chicken.

23. Lolita (Midtown Village). Marcie Tunney’s upscale Mexican spot has great margaritas, tacos, taquizas, enchiladas, and a few fun sides like elote and maduros.

24. El Vez (Midtown Village). Stephen Starr’s straightforward Mexican spot with a large menu of guacamole options and very good if predictable American-Mexican food.

25. Farmicia (Old City). Farm-to-table food with a wide menu that I find great if you don’t know if your fellow diners are adventurous eaters, since they offer plenty of accessible options plus some quirky dishes for the more daring eaters.

I still haven’t made it to Zahav; I’ve twice had reservations and had to cancel, once for work (still mad), once because of illness. I’ve been to Double Knot, but only for happy hour, which is a different menu than dinner but still very good. I haven’t been to Laurel, Friday Saturday Sunday, Noord eetcafe, or Serpico. I can’t eat at South Philly Barbacoa, and I’m not paying what Vetri Cucina is asking.

Places I’ve tried and didn’t like: Vernick Food & Drink (they sent out a dish that was actually burned, enough that I sent it back, which I almost never do), Res Ipsa (ordered a hot sandwich that arrived cold), Sate Kampar (spicy food, but not flavorful at all).

Finally, for coffee, Re-Animator is my favorite roaster in Philly, with Elixr second. I love the Menagerie coffee shop across the street from Farmicia, where they use Dogwood espresso and a few third-wave roasters from around the country for pourovers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ July 18, 2018
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DC eats, 2018 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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