→ June 9, 2011
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Disneyland eats.

I did promise a review of the food at Disneyland, with a warning that it’s nowhere near as good as the food at Disneyworld is. Disneyland’s options are more limited of necessity, but we also found the execution wasn’t as good and had more disappointments than favorites. (I’ve written several posts on the food at Disneyworld over the past four years.)

I’ll start with the two best things we ate. The best meal was at Downtown Disney at the unfortunately named Tortilla Jo’s, which serves much better upscale Mexican fare than you’d expect after hearing the casual-dining name. The server talked me into his favorite dish, the achiote citrus-grilled chicken, which was very good, correctly cooked (that is, not dry) with a ton of flavor from the glaze. It came with chipotle mashed sweet potatoes that didn’t stint on the heat or mask it with sugar, charro beans, and roasted corn on the cob, for a meal that probably could have fed two. My wife was also impressed by her enchiladas suizas, saying they compared well to her favorite Mexican place from back in Massachusetts, and also finding herself full after eating about half her meal. They have aguas frescas although I found the tamarind a little watery. They don’t offer guacamole as a small side item, unfortunately – it’s made tableside, which isn’t ideal for flavor development, and is something like $9 for a very large bowl of the green stuff.

The other hit was the beignets served at the French Market at New Orleans Square, at a side window on the side facing the railroad station. The beignets are thinner than you’d get in New Orleans and are shaped like Mickey, airy inside, freshly fried and golden brown, handed over in a bag with powdered sugar. Skip the “fritters” served elsewhere in New Orleans Square (they were undercooked inside, but also had the wrong texture) and get the beignets instead.

I’d give a passing grade to Naples, the “authentic” pizzeria also at Downtown Disney. The crust was solid, better texture than flavor, mildly charred in the wood-fired ovens, and the quality of the ingredients was top-notch. Unfortunately their basic tomato sauce is badly underseasoned and both the pizza and the pasta with sauce tasted flat. (Get it? Pizza? Flat? Never mind.) I don’t know if we hit them on the wrong day; the executive chef is Italian and I can’t imagine he’d give his imprimatur to this sauce, which tasted more like pureed canned tomatoes than a cooked, seasoned sauce. If they tweaked that, they have everything else in place to have a restaurant I could preach about.

What’s most peculiar about Naples is that the restaurant management group behind it also runs Via Napoli, the new authentic pizzeria at Epcot in the Italy pavilion (which I reviewed earlier this spring). I’ve eaten there three times in the last six months across two trips and there is no comparison – everything at Via Napoli is better, from the crust to how it’s baked to the sauce to the ingredients to the menu, which includes more options for toppings, more ability to customize your pizza, better appetizers (including a verdure fritte that I recommend), and way better desserts, led by ricotta zeppole served with a warm chocolate sauce.

Returning to Disneyland, we had breakfast at La Brea Bakery just at the entrance to the promenade as you walk into the complex from the theme park entrances. The bread was good, the pastries were not (they were tough and gummy), the bacon was high quality, the potatoes served with the egg dishes were also ordinary. It does the job if you want a filling breakfast, which we did, but it’s not something to go out of your way to hit.

Ariel’s Grotto in California Adventure has a prix fixe dinner special that includes admission to the World of Color light show, which was just amazing. My daughter was riveted almost from the start and for days afterward would spontaneously ask us, “Remember when we saw the World of Color?” Clips from Disney films are projected on to sprays of water over the artificial lagoon, interspersed with colored lights and the odd bit of pyrotechnics. That made up for a meal that was just average. You have a choice of antipasti; we went with the vegetarian one so my daughter would have more options; the cheeses (manchego and fresh mozzarella) were excellent but the vegetables were undermarinated. For my main course I chose the grilled redfish with pineapple chutney over wild rice pilaf with sauteed vegetables; the fish was perfectly cooked and well-seasoned, although it needed the sweet/sour flavors of the chutney to boost the flavor, while the sides were just filling the plate. The family-style dessert options were mostly disappointing, led by the “chocolate lava cake” that was around 40-50 degrees, so the inside was thick like grainy fudge, not oozing like lava. (And the server said this wasn’t a kitchen error.) The French macarons, however, were phenomenal, perfect in color, shape, and flavor, the kind for which you’d pay at least $3 apiece at a bakery in LA or Manhattan.

We did one character meal, breakfast with Minnie and Friends, at the Plaza Inn. The character part was fantastic and my daughter was over the moon to meet characters she’d never met before (Eeyore, Tigger, Captain Hook, and Chip). The food was like a hotel buffet, and there were execution problems all over the place, like trays not being replenished, waffle/pancake toppings still at refrigerator temperatures, and slow service everywhere.

The quick-service Mexican place in Frontierland, Rancho del Zocalo, was also very disappointing, the one place where we ended up leaving most of the food on our plates. I tried the grilled fish tacos, which were bitter, overcooked, and badly seasoned. The rice we were served was dry and flavorless. My wife got enchiladas with carne asada and said the steak was too tough to chew – and she typically orders steak or burgers well-done.

What’s so odd about this is how different it is at Disneyworld, where the restaurants are like well-oiled machines and the food is consistent. We have places to which we look forward when heading to Florida, from Raglan Road to Jiko to Flame Tree and now to Via Napoli as well, and plenty of options that are more than just “fill the stomach” even if they’re not automatic favorites. I don’t know if we hit some kind of lull in Anaheim but it didn’t live up to my expectations.

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→ February 25, 2011
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Catching up on recent eats…

‘Pomo Pizzeria*, located just north of Old Town Scottsdale in the pretentious Borgata shopping center, has been certified by the Neapolitan authority that travels the world and gives its imprimatur to pizzerias serving authentic Naples-style pizza. It lacks the cachet of Pizzeria Bianco, but has the benefit of being easier to patronize, since they’re open for lunch and take reservations, with a product that’s nearly as good as their more famous rival.

*Yes, there’s an apostrophe before the word ‘Pomo, something I have yet to decipher. The Italian word for tomatoes is pomodoro, but if the restaurant’s name derives from that word the apostrophe is on the wrong end. Perhaps the Borgata’s owners insisted on the apostrophe to ratchet up the restaurant’s elitist factor.

‘Pomo’s menu is straightforward – a few antipasti, salads, and many pizza options with an extensive list of ingredients, several of which are imported from Italy, including mozzarella di bufala and proscuitto di Parma. The oven runs up to 950 degrees, on the low end of acceptable for this kind of product, and the crust had the requisite slight char with plenty of lift to it. Neapolitan pizza doughs are very thin in the center and should still be wet when they reach the table, although they’ll tend to firm up as the pizza cools; don’t be alarmed by reviews that call it “soggy,” as that’s an application of an American standard for pizza to a completely different product. The texture is fine, while the dough’s taste is a little quiet compared to the toppings.

I went with two other writers, Nick Piecoro and Molly Knight, and somehow we all ended up with pizzas that boasted at least one pork product. I went with a bianca pizza, one of maybe a half-dozen tomato-less options on the menu, featuring mozzarella, prosciutto, and Parmiggiano-Reggiano, a combination that would be too salty and acidic if you layered any sort of cooked tomatoes underneath them. Nick and Molly both went for tomato-based pizzas featuring more charcuterie, including the diavolo, featuring a spicy salame that ‘Pomo uses in lieu of pepperoni (which is fine by me, as I find most pepperoni to be harsh).

There’s a definite focus here on fresh and authentic ingredients; the mixed greens in the salad were immaculate, the Parmiggiano-Reggiano was the real deal (not some American or Argentine knockoff), and the tomatoes come from San Marzano (although I admit I probably wouldn’t know the difference on that score). They also offer a handful of Moretti beers for about $5 apiece, including La Rossa, a red beer that’s about 8% alcohol that is outstanding but requires that I surrender my keys before ordering. Total damage for three pizzas (which run $11-16 each), a salad, a beer, and four glasses of wine was about $105 with tax but before tip, and we had probably 2/3 of a pizza left over. It wasn’t quite the transformative experience that my one meal at Pizzeria Bianco was, but it is among the best pizza experiences I’ve ever had in the United States, one I strongly recommend.

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Speaking of authentic pizza in America, in December my family and I went to Via Napoli, the new restaurant in Walt Disney World at Epcot’s Italy pavilion; we were lucky to get two reservations in our week in Orlando but I understand it’s become a tough ticket as word has spread. Via Napoli’s menu is somewhat limited, with fewer toppings available and not much in the way of salads, but more antipasto options including some expertly fried verdure fritte (fried vegetables) and prosciutto e mela (prosciutto and fresh cantaloupe). The restaurant boasts three giant wood-fired ovens and the dough is superb, with thicker crusts (perhaps to suit American palates?) but less of the trademarked char on the exterior. As with ‘Pomo, Via Napoli imports many of its key ingredients and I felt the mozzarella they used was more flavorful, perhaps because it contained a little more salt. (Cheese without salt is like water without oxygen.) The dessert menu includes real gelato and a new take on zeppole, the Italian version of fried dough; Via Napoli’s includes ricotta cheese in the mix, which you’d expect would make the end product heavier but instead creates these soft, slightly sweet pillows of dough that don’t actually need any accompaniments but oh hey you brought some dark chocolate sauce so I feel obliged to use it. Via Napoli is where I discovered La Rossa and where I discovered that a large serving of it will keep me inebriated for at least six solid hours.

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On to Los Angeles from mid-February, where I’ll start with the last meal I had, Bludso’s BBQ in Compton on Long Beach Boulevard, a real hole in the wall that focuses on takeout with an emphasis on brisket and beef ribs. The service was definitely more Texas than downtown LA, and when I asked what the specialty was the woman behind the counter insisted that I sample the brisket before ordering; it was smoky and tender and didn’t need sauce to provide flavor or moisture, although the salty-sweet-earthy sauce they use is a good complement. For takeout they package their meats in foil with a healthy dose of sauce, enough that it started to drown out the meat’s flavors, but that’s easily fixed by asking for less sauce or for the sauce on the side. The ribs were smaller than I expected but had good tooth and pulled away from the bone pretty easily. The collard greens were deep-South style, cooked low and slow with plenty of liquor included; the baked beans had become soft and mushy but had strong flavors from the meat included in them. For about $11 you can get two meats, two sides, a piece of northern-style (that is, very sweet) cornbread, and some of that white bread that people in Texas always serve with Q but that just confuses everyone else. Yes, it’s a bad area, but it’s worth seeking out.

I met my friend Jay Berger at his local favorite sushi place, Yoshi’s Sushi on Santa Monica in West Hollywood. We had nothing but nigiri, which has become my style anyway after reading The Story of Sushi last summer. About half came with a ponzu sauce, including the yellowtail and the halibut; everything was fresh and only the salmon was disappointing, although I should know by now that salmon nigiri is not very authentic – I just love salmon in any preparation. The albacore, which I usually find kind of boring, and red snapper were both among the best I’ve had of each kind of fish. However, I tried octopus for the first time and am still chewing it three weeks later. Next time I’ll stick with the raw stuff.

And I should throw another mention at Square One Dining in Hollywood, which is becoming my breakfast ritual when I’m in town for the Compton workout. Square One focuses on natural, local ingredients, and their breakfasts include some real throwback elements, like bacon rashers cut about three times as thick as you’d get at a typical diner or fresh eggs cooked to order. My only criticism is that despite using good tea, somehow it’s already overbrewed and bitter when it reaches the table, which makes me think they have pots of tea ready to go for breakfast service – thoughtful, but counterproductive.

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→ November 18, 2010
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Hillside Spot & Barrio Cantina.

Busy day today. I’ll be chatting at 1 pm EST, on the Scott Van Pelt Show on ESPN Radio at 2:05 pm EST, and on Outside the Lines on ESPN shortly after 3 pm.

My latest post at mental_floss covers the histories of eight classic board games, with another post on the history of Settlers of Catan coming later today. And my last two posts over on ESPN.com broke down the Joaquin Benoit signing and the Uggla trade and John Buck signing.

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I’ve mentioned Hillside Spot before, but let me recommend it again: If you live anywhere near the Ahwatukee region of Phoenix, or pass through it on I-10, you need to try this place, because the food is outstanding.

I’ve been for breakfast and lunch and can vouch for both meals. The “El Gallo” torta with eggs, chorizo, and avocado was tremendous, with the eggs cooked to order (they’re not that quick – that would be my only warning, but I will wait for food like this); bright, fresh avocado; just the right amount of mayo; and a fresh, soft, square roll from La Sonorense Tortilla Factory in downtown Phoenix. It’s a steal at $6. Their pancakes have earned some acclaim around here, for good reason – they’re eggy and buttery, like a thick, soft crepe, with one order more than my wife could finish even with some serious help from me. It looks like they rotate their coffees but try to offer something from a local roaster, such as one from Tempe’s Cartel Coffee Labs the day I was there.

I went back for lunch because I’d seen a pulled pork sandwich on their menu, with the pork first braised then finished over mesquite on their rotisserie grill. The pork was perfect, falling apart but with good browning on the outside, with a good background smoke flavor. It comes with a spicy cole slaw and, oddly enough, sliced fresh pear, which was a new combination for me but worked well, giving the sandwich a little bite and providing a small amount of natural sweetness to balance the acidity in the slaw. It comes on the same bread as the torta (telera bread), and the French fries, one of four side options, were hand-cut and just-fried.

Hillside Spot uses a lot of local vendors (including all of their eggs) and has that great funky cafe vibe I love to find in a local restaurant – like the Mission in San Diego or Blue Moon Cafe in Baltimore. Other than the Angel Sweet gelateria, I haven’t found anything as exciting as this place since we moved. It’s located on Warner and 48th, behind the McDonald’s, in the same strip mall where the Sunday farmer’s market is held.

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We found Hillside Spot because it was mentioned in Phoenix magazine as one of the best new restaurants of 2010. We also tried another one, Barrio Cantina, in Scottsdale on Cactus right by the Tatum mall. The food was good, but on the heavy side, not just in fat content (that doesn’t usually bother me) but in the chef’s hand, adding sauces and flavors that end up detracting from the dish. But the core ingredients were all very strong, particularly their meats.

They offer a strong selection of taco plates, all available with corn or flour tortillas or as a torta. I went with the torta – that’s a new dish for me since we moved out here, so I’m indulging – made with machaca short ribs, braised to the point of collapse, with a full, satisfying, beefy flavor. It comes with shredded, slightly wilted cabbage and a crema that was probably unnecessary with the fattiness of the short rib. The dish came with a scoop of a strange, earthy rice and corn mixture that was slightly overcooked but tasted good, a solid neutral note to give me a break from the strong flavors of the machaca.

My wife went with a carnitas enchilada that came in a small cast-iron skillet and was served with the tortillas open, so the sauce and cheese (browned slightly under a salamander) were directly on the meat. She enjoyed it, although the presentation within the skillet was a mess.

We tried one appetizer, the “mini chimis” – small chimichangas where the ratio from dough to meat is way too high. I peeled a few of them open and ate the carnitas and machaca inside, to reduce the doughiness and get away from the tangy crema sticking to the outside like wallpaper paste. Someone there really knows how to slow-cook meat; they just need to work on how they serve it.

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→ October 29, 2010
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Friday links and bullets.

• Yesterday’s chat transcript.
• I won’t say the name of the Project Runway winner, for those of you who DVR’d it but haven’t watched it, but it looked to me like the judges chose probability over upside – and I’m a firm believer in going for upside. You have a chance to get an all-world talent, whether it’s a #1 starter or a fashion genius or a revolutionary chef, that’s who you go for. This wasn’t an example of the upside designer flopping in the finals; my wife, the real PR fan in the house, was mad because she thought the upside designer did exactly what the judges praised the designer for all season.
• Had breakfast this morning at the Hillside Spot in Ahwautukee, at Warner and 48th just west of I-10. To borrow a term from a certain AFL super-fan, it was “out-STAN-ding.” I’ve been hoping to find a funky, progressive kind of breakfast/lunch spot like that since we moved here, and I’m glad Phoenix magazine highlighted them last month. The food took a little while to get to us, even though the place wasn’t busy, but everything was made to order and that is the best reason in the world to wait for food.
• This NPR story on how the private prison industry pushed through Arizona’s immigration law is a model for modern journalism, a type of investigative reporting I don’t see as often as I did ten or fifteen years ago. I wish NPR did more of it, and given how many candidates campaigning here are using their position on the law as a major part of their platforms, it should be mailed to every voter in Arizona before Tuesday. (I’m not advocating a vote either way on any candidate or ballot question – merely that voters should be informed before making any voting decisions.)

• One of my favorite restaurants in Vegas, Lotus of Siam, is opening a second location Greenwich Village.
• I’m still under the weather, so I didn’t head to any AFL games and won’t today, but the forced rest meant that I finished Richard Russo’s tremendous novel Bridge of Sighs and am already halfway through Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, a quirky history of the baseball card industry – or a history of the quirky baseball card industry, and the quirky people at the heart of it. (I received a review copy of Mint Condition from the publisher.) I hope to post a review of Bridge of Sighs over the weekend.

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→ October 4, 2010
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San Diego eats + ESPN linkage.

My hypothetical awards ballots are up, and some of the comments are priceless – mostly whining about bias or calling me an idiot. You can also see my briefer-than-normal scouting reports on the eight playoff teams:

Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers

Atlanta Braves
Cincinnati Reds
Philadelphia Phillies
San Francisco Giants

I hope to resume regular dish blogging now that those playoff previews are done. Thanks for bearing with me.

–

We didn’t make it to my old favorite, Cafe 222 (waffle heaven), but did get to The Mission, recommended by readers and by a scout as well. It pushes a hipster vibe but on Sunday morning the place was full of families with young kids, so all the talk about “revolution” seems a little silly. All of the food was fresh with bright colors, and the egg dishes come with two slices of light, airy rosemary bread that I’d probably buy by the loaf if I lived in San Diego. The blueberry-cornmeal pancakes were a disappointment, as they’re not cornmeal pancakes but regular pancakes with some coarsely-ground cornmeal thrown on the griddle – dry – with pancake batter poured over them, resulting in an unpleasant, pebble-like texture that ruined what was otherwise a soft, fluffy pancake. The meats, both bacon and chicken apple sausage, were better, while the rosemary potatoes were hit or miss, with some pieces perfect but others overcooked. I’d like to try them again while ordering differently.

Our other breakfast spot was Brian’s 24 on 6th, offering huge portions of solid-average food (eggs, pancakes, french toast) but nothing spectacular. It had the advantages of being fairly quick and walkable from our hotel, but I’d rate it behind the Mission and Cafe 222.

Ortega’s Mexican Bistro in Hillcrest was the huge dinner find, authentic homestyle Mexican cooking in a more upscale setting. The restaurant is in what looks like a converted two-story house with funky internal architectural features and lots of distressed wood, but really, who cares about that when you have someone in the back making fresh flour tortillas by hand? I might fly to San Diego once a week to grab a bag of those things – the texture and fullness was amazing, and if you told me they used lard in there I’d believe you. The roasted-tomato salsa that came with the chips before the meal was also outstanding, thick but not unwieldy and not in the least watery, and they make a very solid jamaica agua fresca. The sopecitos appetizer was rich, a little too dense for me (that’s a comment on my tastes, though, as “dense” may be authentic for all I know), and didn’t need the sour crema laced over the tops. Their carnitas were superbly done, no hint of dryness with lots of crispy edges, and with the sides of rice and charro beans it was more than either of us could finish. That whole Hillcrest neighborhood looks like the kind of place I’d love to live.

We had one dinner in the Gaslamp district – I got a lot of suggestions from readers, but many weren’t appropriate for dinner with a four-year-old – so we called an audible and went to Trattoria la Bocca, offering well-made if overpriced Italian food. My wife’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, just al dente with a creamy (texture, not flavor) sauce that didn’t overwhelm the rice or mushrooms; I had a sauteed veal dish with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and zucchini where every element was cooked properly but the dish as a whole had too many competing flavors. For what it’s worth, of those reader recommendations, the most intriguing one was a bar-restaurant called Neighborhood, which will be at the top of my list of places to hit the next time I’m in San Diego by myself.

Right near Petco is a small boutique shop called Cupcake Heaven that sells … well, you know. We tried several kinds over the 48-odd hours we were there, with the chocolate-chocolate and peanut butter ones my favorites; the peanut butter frosting had a texture somewhere between mousse and buttercream, and there were peanuts in the cupcake itself, resulting in something like the lightest peanut butter cookie you’ve ever had. The pumpkin cupcake’s frosting was very gingery, fine for me but lost on my ginger-hating wife. And the cupcakes were still fairly moist the second day.

I only tried one concession stand at Petco, Randy Jones’ BBQ, which was nothing more than standard, boring ballpark Q drowned in a sticky-sweet sauce. I hope there’s something better there for Padre fans.

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→ June 26, 2010
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What happened to Bermuda?

My last Tournament of Stars update is on ESPN.com. I still have some video to file as well.

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I mentioned in my St. Kitts post that my wife and I decided against a return trip to Bermuda for our 15th anniversary after we went there on our honeymoon, our fifth anniversary, and our tenth anniversary. A few of you asked me to elaborate, so I’ll do so, but I have to emphasize up front that our last trip there was (if you’re too lazy to do the math) five years ago, and it may be out of date.

Let me start with what we liked about Bermuda. It’s a beautiful island, naturally pretty, but was also fairly prosperous and well-maintained. The capital city, Hamilton, is like something out of a dream, clean, bright, open, busy in a quiet way, walkable with shops and restaurants up and down its few main streets. There’s a second town, more of a village, called St. George, on the east end of the island, also worth at least one visit. The island is small and easily navigable by moped – tourists are not permitted to rent cars – and I have to say that sitting in a closed car would rob you of some of the experience. Locals would chat with us while we were stopped at red lights, and we got a restaurant recommendation or two that way. The beaches have sand flecked with pink, and the water is as blue and clear as anything we found in St. Kitts. One of my favorite rums in the world, Gosling’s Black Seal, is blended and bottled in Bermuda. Most of the people we met on our visits there were friendly. And it’s just a two-hour flight from the east coast of the U.S.

We had a few favorites for food across our trips. The best place that’s still operating is Bistro J, in downtown Hamilton, where the menu changes daily, with five entree options and I believe two or three desserts written each afternoon on a blackboard in the dining room. Everything we ate there was spectacular and I will always remember that as the place I first tried sticky toffee pudding. Monty’s was at one point a simple, slightly cheap spot for locals that served amazing breakfasts, although it had gone upscale by the time we visited in 2005. The Hog Penny is a British pub in Hamilton that we discovered on our first trip, and the Swizzle Inn does make a killer rum swizzle, a cocktail that masks its potency with fruit juice. Paraquet is a little place catering mostly to locals that makes an incredible fried fish sandwich; it’s located in an apartment complex in Paget Parish right on South Road.

We stayed somewhere different on each trip; our favorite was the Salt Kettle Inn, a very small but perfectly located B&B just across the bay from Hamilton and thus a short ferry ride or moped trip into town. (The benefit of taking the moped in the mornings is that you get to see Johnny Barnes, the friendliest man in the world, waving to you and all the other commuters into Hamilton each morning.) We also stayed at the Elbow Beach resort for our honeymoon in 1995; the beach is outstanding for swimming, but the hotel itself is just an average American hotel with shops and restaurants added, with the room no better than what you’d find at a standard Hilton or Marriott, but at twice the price.

Hotel beaches in Bermuda are largely private, but they do have some excellent public ones. Our favorite public beach was Church Bay, on the western side of the south shore. The snorkeling there was amazing with plenty to see even when the water is just a few feet deep, and the water is fairly calm because of outlying rocks. There’s another beach on the eastern half called Shelly Bay Beach that’s very long and shallow and would be great for kids or unconfident swimmers. We usually took an afternoon to visit the small zoo and aquarium, and just generally tooled around the island. Getting around the island was simple between the moped and taxis, and we could go from St. George to the Dockyard (one end of Bermuda to the other) in about an hour.

That’s the good, but when we went back in 2005 we found it didn’t measure up to our memories from the first two trips. The biggest issue was that the place was starting to look a little run down. They’d had a hurricane a year prior but by August of ’05 still hadn’t finished basic maintenance tasks, like fixing a broken walkway from the parking area to the sand at Church Bay. We saw drunk locals in the streets of Hamilton for the first time – completely harmless, but still a sign that the economy there wasn’t in such great shape. And Front Street in Hamilton had gone from three department stores in 1995 to none in 2005, and as far as I can tell none has been replaced. (I understand that those stores were critical to locals, but they offered plenty for tourists who were looking for non-touristy shopping.)

We also found that the quality of the food at several of our favorite places had fallen off. We ate at the Hog Penny at least twice on that last trip, and everything we had underwhelmed us, even though in probably a half-dozen or more meals there on the previous two trips we had always loved the food. The Swizzle Inn changed its menu completely between 2000 and 2005, and the food quality went south as well. The food at Monty’s didn’t change, but the price went up with the décor, although it’s still the best breakfast bet we found on the island.

I also noticed in 2005 that while locals were still on the whole very friendly, we encountered more rudeness than we had before, and my guess is that it was a little anti-Americanism at work. (For whatever it’s worth, and that may be nothing, the poor treatment we received never came from black Bermudians, only whites. I don’t know why that would be true, but it is.)

And the final straw for us was the price. It’s very expensive to stay and eat in Bermuda, and the lack of any major U.S. Chain on the island means that frequent-guest points are useless there. (There are two Fairmont hotels, if that’s how you roll.) Renting a moped for the week, while fun, isn’t cheap, and heading there now with a four-year-old would mean a lot of cab fares, and getting a cab from a public beach was not easy.
But Bermuda has a more fundamental price problem – they slap a tax of 25% or more on all imported goods, so the prices of even basic goods are jacked up, and it flows through to restaurant meals, hotel prices, and of course affects people who live on the island greatly. Add to that their unwillingness to wean themselves from the teat of cruise ship docking fees, even though cruise ship customers do nothing to help island businesses directly but are happy to come and consume public resources like beaches, making it less appealing for people who want to come and actually contribute directly to island hotels, restaurants, and shops.

Bermuda was a little less appealing for us than it might be to a first-time visitor because we will compare everything to our previous visits to the island; I imagine if we went there for the first time now, we’d find it charming, because we lacked any knowledge of what it was like ten or fifteen years ago. And, again, we haven’t been in five years, so it may have made a major turnaround in that time. I haven’t heard anything to that effect, and as far as I know the massive import tax is still in place and the cruise ships are still coming and throwing their weight around. I would love to have my old Bermuda back, but I’m afraid now it may be gone for good.

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→ June 22, 2010
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Saint Kitts.

As most of you know by now, I was completely off the grid last week for a family vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, half of a two-island nation (Saint Kitts and Nevis, formerly Saint Christopher and Nevis) in the Leeward Islands, a little bit east of Puerto Rico. My wife and I settled on St. Kitts for a few reasons, one of which was the presence of a Marriott where I could utilize all these points I’ve racked up, and another was the fact that we didn’t know anyone who’d been. I’d read previously that the island had been making a strong effort to cultivate high-end tourism as its main economic activity, since the sugar cane industry had died owing to high labor costs (the canes have to be harvested by hand) and the United States’ absurd sugar quotas, which prop up a dying domestic sugar industry in Florida, support our nation’s addiction to high fructose corn syrup, and really stick it to various allies of ours in the sugar business, including Australia. But I digress. We had fun and ate well, but it’s more of a rest-and-relax destination than a place for serious sightseeing.

We spent most of our time at the resort itself, largely a function of our daughter’s primary interest, going in the resort’s pools. The St. Kitts Marriott is adjacent to a beach – all beaches in St. Kitts are public so it would be inaccurate to say the hotel has a beach – but it’s on the Atlantic side of the island, with somewhat rougher waters and zero scenic value. The pools are perfect for kids; the two we used go no deeper than four feet, including the one with the swim-up bar. The staff were over-the-top friendly, and the service everywhere in the hotel was top-notch, although my wife and I noticed that each new staff member we met began with a slight standoffishness that disappeared after a few moments of chatter. When I asked one of the waitresses we knew particularly well if that had something to do with Americans being rude*, she confirmed it, off the record of course.

*Seriously. I don’t know if Americans – and we saw at least two such incidents ourselves – treat the staff there rudely because the staff members are not Americans, or because they speak with accents, or, most likely, because they are black, but if you’re one of those Americans, do me a favor and stay home, so I can stop pretending I’m Canadian every time I leave the damn country. The waitresses and porters and valets are service workers, but that does not entitle you to treat them like they’re the help.

There were a few hiccups at the hotel when we got there, as they “upgraded” us to a room that turned out to lack air conditioning (we were told, after three calls to the front desk finally produced a staff member at our door, that the “chiller” was broken), but they did fall all over themselves to make it right. I also think it’s weird that the towel hut by the pools closes at 6:30 pm – if you don’t return the towels by then they charge you $25 – when the pools are open till 11 and guests might want to take towels to an off-site beach.

And we did, as we found a superior beach within walking distance of the hotel (or a $6 cab ride away) at Frigate Bay, home also of a row of restaurant-bars known as the Strip. Frigate Bay Beach sits on the Caribbean side, and despite the lack of a visible row of rocks to break some of the waves, it was significantly calmer than the beach next to the Marriott, and my daughter was thrilled at the number and variety of seashells there. We ate at one of the restaurants on the Strip, Mr. X’s Shiggidy Shack, but I’ll save that for the food portion of the post.

The third beach we visited was a haul from the hotel, a $22 cab ride that took at least 20 minutes, but it was the most beautiful by far: Cockleshell Bay Beach, on the southern tip of the island of St. Kitts, only about two miles from Nevis. The sand was the cleanest, the scenery the most lush, and the view of Nevis is tremendous, with the latter’s central volcano practically throwing its shadow on you. And, true to its name, it had many shells, mostly cockles.

Our one other expedition outside the hotel was to “the city,” Basseterre, the nation’s capital and the only significant population center on the island. It was disappointing, although I think that is in part because we compared it to Hamilton, Bermuda, the only other island town we’ve ever visited; Hamilton is (or at least was in 2005) clean, bright, and busy, with wide streets and plenty of places to eat and shop. Basseterre has a shlock district called Port Zante that is new, bright, and full of stores selling crappy trinkets, cheap liquor (not that there’s anything wrong with that), jewelry, or other duty-free items for tourists on cruise ships, who generally do little to help the economies of the islands they visit. From there, we crossed into the Circus area, where we found a few local shops but not much in the way of restaurants or other establishments to keep us in town. The streets are narrow and many of the buildings outside of Port Zante were run down. I’m well aware that the town is there for its residents and not its tourists, but I saw a lost opportunity there for an island that is trying to cultivate a niche in high-end tourism.

You can do some nature tours within Saint Kitts or Nevis, both of which have rain forests around their central volcanoes (Saint Kitts’ peak is extinct, while Nevis’ has been dormant for millennia), but even without my daughter there I’m not sure I would have suggested that sort of activity. It was way too hot.

The airport merits mention because it’s so hilariously small. There are four “gates,” which are just doors a few feet apart in the same wall of the lone departure lounge, and all exit to the same piece of asphalt. The tower is actually across the runway in an adjacent field. There is no restaurant, just a tiny bar that serves prefab sandwiches and three trinket shops before security. The duty free stores after security did offer excellent prices on liquor, cheaper than anything I saw elsewhere. I’ll get to the liquor in a second.

My main complaint about St. Kitts aside from the absence of a nice town is the expense of getting around the island. Getting from the hotel to town was $12 without tip each way, for a trip of about ten minutes. It’s not an exorbitant fare, but suddenly it’s $30 round-trip to get to Basseterre, $50 round-trip to get to Cockleshell Bay (and a good restaurant there), $15 each way from the airport, and it adds up. I’d rather spend my money on food or local goods than on getting around, but there’s no alternative, and we spent more time in the hotel as a result. We also skipped Nevis, partly for cost reasons (it would have been $80-100 round-trip just to get there), but mostly because we didn’t think my daughter would be up for the roughly 90 minutes it would have taken each way to get from our hotel to the Botanical Gardens, the one site on Nevis we thought might hold her interest. At the end of the day, she was happy in the pool.

Last stop before I run through the restaurants: St. Kitts does have three local rum producers, and I brought home one bottle of Belmont Estates’ gold rum. It’s unaged, which means it has a harsher taste than any of my preferred rums from around the region (Appleton and Cruzan are my favorites at the moment), and the bars at the Marriott didn’t offer it. They did offer Brinley rums, five varieties of flavored rums blended on the island but (I believe) distilled elsewhere, and anyway flavored rums are for sissies so I never bothered. The third kind is CSR, short for Cane Spirit Rothschild, distilled from sugar cane rather than from molasses, and like that style of spirit it’s more for sipping than for mixing. The duty free stores I found usually had a few options from around the region, including Appleton, Cruzan, Bacardi (a waste of good molasses, in my opinion), Myers, and Mount Gay, as did the bars at the Marriott*.

*Rum and ginger ale was my drink of choice during the week, with either Myers dark or Appleton gold, but I did order two other drinks. One was a guava daiquiri, mostly because I love guava anything, but the resulting drink tasted mostly of … guava, with the rum well buried in the background. The other was planter’s punch, which I thought was always based on a fairly standard formula, but the Marriott’s version had Bacardi, Myers dark, a liqueur I didn’t catch, and a splash of juice. If I had gone in St. Kitts to forget something, it would have been the perfect drink.

Now, the food, starting with the options in the hotel. Cafe Calypso serves breakfast and lunch, and the breakfast buffet is pricey ($21-25) but excellent. There’s section of local breakfast items, with one rotating protein dish (fried tilapia, a stew with salt cod, pork stew, some kind of spicy chicken) alongside fried plantains, cinnamon-tinged jonnycakes, grilled vegetables, and crepes with what I assume was a house-made three-berry compote that was incredible – my daughter and I inhaled the stuff. They also have the standard assortment of American foods, and a strong array of pastries which were definitely made in-house (we talked to the pastry chef). The only miss was the horrible tea selection: I’m in a former British colony and you’re offering me … Bigelow?

The lunch menu isn’t long, but it’s diverse, including a turkey BLT with a fried egg as one of the layers, a Caesar wrap with fried fish (tasted great, but the heat from the fish made the dressing run), a chicken roti (traditional local fare, with curried chicken wrapped in a lavash-like bread, but the filling had zero salt and thus near zero taste), chimichurri skirt steak with mashed potatoes (the steak was a little undermarinated but they had the righ idea), and, my favorite item, ribs with a guava BBQ sauce (extremely tender with a sweet-and-sour sauce that would go on just about any meat – I’d love that with duck). The chefs all over the hotel are accommodating if you have an off-menu request, and they made grilled cheese for my (vegetarian) daughter that was actually grilled, with grill marks; I don’t think she failed to finish any of the ones she had at the Calypso.

Outside the restaurant is the actual cafe, with a full assortment of espresso-based drinks, although their espresso-making skills are a little lacking; twice I saw the barista put the grounds in the portafilter without tamping them down, which is a good way to make brown water if that’s what you’re going for. They have a pastry case with cookies, muffins, and, for $4, desserts like slices of opera cake or Black Forest Cake, or individiual tiramisu portions that were big enough for my wife and I to split. We ate well in the hotel all week, but the pastry chef gets the gold star for the tiramisu and for the donuts, also made in-house and likely the best I have ever tasted.

It is also worth mentioning that the staff at the Calypso were outstanding and took the time to learn our names, greeted our daughter every morning (even waitresses who weren’t working our section would come over to say hi), and memorize our drink orders. They don’t have to do any of that, and I would never expect it, but it added a lot to our stay. And they did this knowing full well that we came from the U.S. In fact, we found everyone we met on the island to be friendly once we proved we wouldn’t bite, and many locals thanked us for choosing to take our vacation on St. Kitts.

Still in the Marriott, there’s a very strong Italian restaurant called La Cucina that has an antipasto bar that I’d call a can’t-miss, including real prosciutto, marinated artichokes, roasted peppers (three colors!), and a giant block of Parmiggiano-Reggiano from which you can carve your own slices or chunks. The entrees I had were both just short of great. The risotto with wild mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes had huge mushroom flavor, including morels (that is, an actual wild mushroom, as opposed to places that say “wild mushroom” and give you creminis), but they used a strain of rice I haven’t seen in risotto before, and it didn’t produce the right creamy texture I’d expect in that dish. The ravioli in butter were just that: House-made ravioli served in melted butter, not fried briefly in butter to get some color on the pasta, then served in brown butter. It was fine, and my daughter might not have tried them if they’d been browned, but nothing that an average home cook couldn’t produce. My wife had the pasta alla bolognese twice, getting a generous portion of pasta and meat with a sauce that featured strong, fresh flavors of all the vegetables it contained (carrots, onions, and celery, at the very least).

We ate one other meal at Blu, a seafood restaurant at the Marriott with an impressive array of fish options, although the best thing I had there was the mashed potatoes with truffle oil, sweet, ridiculously creamy, but with the irregular texture of “smashed” potatoes, a nice contrast to the largely soft potato-crusted grouper I had as my main course. The house salad has a pomegranate vinaigrette that wasn’t cloyingly sweet like berry vinaigrettes usually are, and the greens looked like they’d just been picked*. The chocolate-and-peanut-butter mousse tart could have been a little darker, but was otherwise excellent. My wife went with the pork chop – she doesn’t care for fish – and said it was good but so thick that it started to dry out on the edges.

*That was actually a trend all week: Unbelievable salad greens. Brighter colors, crisper leaves, fresher flavors. Maybe that’s their niche within their niche: Come for the beaches, stay for the produce.

Moving off site … Mr. X’s Shiggedy Shack is, in fact, a shack on Frigate Bay Beach, covered but open, with a limited menu that ranges from $30 grilled lobster to $5 burgers. Every local we talked to said that was the one place to eat outside the Marriott, and our favorite waitress at the Marriott told me to get the mahi-mahi, which was incredibly fresh and clean and perfectly grilled, one of the two best pieces of fish I had in a week where I ate a lot of fish. The sides mostly just took up space. Their house rum punch, the Shiggedy Jig, wasn’t very strong and had a liqueur I couldn’t place (Amaretto?) but that dominated the drink. In a rum punch, I should taste the rum, right?

PJ’s is an “authentic” Italian place on the same road as the Marriott and is awful. Imagine if a lifelong resident of St. Kitts had never visited Italy or eaten Italian food but got an old Italian cookbook and decided to open an Italian restaurant. That’s PJ’s.

The Spice Mill has been open on Cockleshell Bay Beach for about a year and a half and had the most innovative menu we found anywhere on the island. My wife had a pulled pork sandwich that she said was outstanding aside from the huge smear of mayonnaise on the bun, which wasn’t advertised on the menu and was about three times as much as a sandwich really needs (besides, pulled pork doesn’t really scream for mayo). I took the server’s advice and went with the Greek salad with mahi-mahi; the fish was the best piece of fish I had all week, immaculately cooked, and the salad was bright and fresh with some mixed greens and diced mango … but feta and mahi-mahi just don’t go together. If they took the cheese out and just called it a mixed salad with mahi-mahi, it would be worth the $50 round-trip cab fare alone.

And that brings me to my last point: For some reason, you need to jump up and down or light your table on fire to get a check at any restaurant in St. Kitts other than Calypso. It took a minimum of 15 minutes from when I asked for the check to when I had a copy of something to sign at La Cucina, the Spice Mill, and Mr. X’s, although the Shack at least deserves credit for owning up to the fact that their register was on the fritz and having the server come to the table and add up the bill for us on a calculator. I’ve heard about people moving on “island time,” but when a customer asks for the check, the restaurant’s goal should be to give it to him and clear the table ASAP.

Would we go to St. Kitts again? Maybe, but I feel like it’s a place worth seeing once rather than twice. There isn’t enough on the island for a young child to do beyond the beaches, and while I like museums that’s not what I’m going for when I head to an island where it’s 90 degrees every day. Once I rack up enough miles to for another island trip, we’re probably headed for someplace new, since St. Kitts didn’t have the same appeal as Bermuda did once upon a time (the decline of Bermuda is another post entirely) and we’d like to experience and see something else. If you’re looking at trying St. Kitts for the first time, though, it’s pretty enough and the Marriott would be an excellent choice for the stay for its staff, its food options, and for its proximity to Frigate Bay Beach, and I can guarantee you that your visit will be appreciated.

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→ May 16, 2010
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Atlanta & Dallas eats.

The updated draft top 100 went up on Friday, and I just went into the Conversation to answer your questions.

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I was only on the ground in Atlanta for about 24 hours last week but did end up eating at three new places.

Big Daddy’s is a well-reviewed and inexpensive soul food place just south of the airport where you order at the counter from steam trays, much like the meat-and-three places I found in Nashville a few years ago. The one surprise to me was the lack of fried dishes – they offer fried fish to order but no fried chicken, which I think of as a staple of Southern cuisine. I’m assuming that they don’t offer it because fried chicken that has been sitting is just not good eats. The service was extremely friendly, but the food – roasted chicken, cornbread stuffing that was way too salty, steamed okra that was just slimy, and collard greens – was unremarkable. Grade 45.

I met a friend of mine from high school for dinner at Milton’s in the town of that name in Fulton County, where we ended up ordering the same thing, the panko-crusted trout with black sesame seeds, which the server told us was their most popular dish. The fish was excellent, very fresh, pan-fried but not greasy, and the sweet red chili sauce underneath was a good complement to the slightly salty taste of the breading. The dish was overloaded with sides, including shrimp-sweet potato fritters that looked amazing but were kind of gummy, and some ho-hum mashed potatoes. I’d give them a 50 for the fish but they may be trying too hard with the extras.

The best meal of the trip came on a tip from Friend of the Dish Richard Dansky, whose novel Firefly Rain earned my recommendation last month. The Buckhead Bread Company is part bakery, part upscale brunch spot. I’m not normally a French toast guy, but I figured that was a smart order in restaurant attached to a bakery. The chef uses rounds cut from brioche and must finish them under a broiler to add a sweet, crunchy crumb topping, and the dish comes with a blueberry sauce and fresh blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries. I also had the sausage patties, which were on the savory side for breakfast and were overcooked, but the saltiness was a good offset to the sweetness of the French toast, which could easily have been on the dessert menu for a fine restaurant. (Pain perdu, the French version of French toast, is served as dessert in France, not as breakfast.) The menu wasn’t extensive but they had several other offerings I wanted to try, so between that and the high quality of what I got, it’s a 55.

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My 24 hours in Dallas were less productive from an eating perspective, as I only ate one meal outside a hotel or ballpark. Spring Creek BBQ is a local chain of Q joints, and there’s one not far from UTA’s park that was reasonably convenient for me to hit before hopping my flight out of DFW. Their sliced beef (brisket) was mixed – the ends were flavorful on their own and just needed a little sauce to cut their dryness, while the center slices were almost too moist and had the texture of corned beef (one of the few foods that I absolutely despise). The mild smoked sausage was plus, a salty-sweet-smoky link of porcine goodness. The sides are serve-yourself, which makes me think about how utterly disgusting most people are, but the meal comes with unlimited hot rolls, a little like a large Parker house roll but white rather than slightly yellow inside, which I assume means it’s made with milk but doesn’t contain much butter. It’s a high 50 for me.

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→ April 8, 2010
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Pressure-cooker carnitas with blue corn pancakes.

Pressure cookers cook foods faster by utilizing the fact that water boils at a higher temperature when it’s under higher pressure; the typical pressure cooker works at 15 psi, a pressure level at which water boils at 250 degrees. For stews or other long braises, this can reduce cooking times by 75% or more, yet you don’t lose the braise’s power to break down connective tissue or extract gelatin (or its precursors) from bones, and of all my pressure-cooking escapades only beans come out substantially different when cooked under pressure. (It causes beans to pop out of their skins, which is fine if your intent is to mash or puree them.)

Cooking with pressure requires no special skills or other equipment beyond the cooker itself, and unlike your mother’s (or grandmother’s) pressure cooker, today’s models aren’t likely to explode and leave your dinner on the ceiling. The model I use is no longer in production; this Presto 6-quart model seems to be the best starter cooker available, although I can’t tell from the item description if it has two pressure settings or just one.

Somehow, I got the idea the other day to try to make carnitas, which I had often in Phoenix and now miss, via the pressure cooker. Pork carnitas refers to a pork butt (really the shoulder), the same cut you would smoke to make barbecued pulled pork, but braised low and slow in a slightly salty liquid with aromatics and spices, especially cumin. A quick Google search for recipes that might tell me how long to cook the meat turned up this recipe, which didn’t require much modification. After thirty minutes under pressure, the chunks of pork held their shape but could pull apart easily with a fork, and the oven finish brought out the flavors you’d ordinarily get by browning the meat before braising or roasting it. You could take the meat, wrap it in a tortilla with some rice, beans, and salsa, and make a burrito; you could serve it with guacamole and rice as a main course; or you could do what I did: Toss a bunch of it on some blue corn pancakes as a sort of Mexican/New Mexican take on chicken and waffles. A recipe for those pancakes follows.

Pressure-cooker carnitas

One 3-4 lb pork butt (shoulder), trimmed of exterior fat and cut into large (two-inch-ish) chunks
1.5 Tbsp salt
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 Tbsp ancho chili powder
1/8-1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1 bay leaf
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, seeds and stem removed, chopped
3 cloves garlic, bruised

1. In a large bowl, toss the pork with the salt and seasonings.
2. Add the pork, bay leaf, and aromatics to a pressure cooker with enough water to cover – it took just over a liter for me to cover 3.3 pounds of meat.
3. Close the cooker, turn the valve to its maximum setting, and put over high heat until the cooker begins hissing loudly. Reduce the heat to bring the cooker to a faint hiss and cook for 30 minutes. With about ten minutes to go, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
4. Release the pressure according to the cooker’s manual – usually that means turning the dial down a level at a time – and remove the pork. Transfer it to an oven-safe skillet or rimmed sheet pan and lightly press each piece with a fork to expose more surface area to the oven’s heat. Re-season with more salt, cumin, etc.
5. Roast the pork with a very thin layer of either the braising liquid or hot water for about 15 minutes, until much of the exposed surface has turned brown. Do not let the pork burn or dry out – check it at the ten-minute mark. Serve.

Blue corn pancakes

I find these sweet without sugar because of the corn, but if you want to make these more breakfasty, you could add 1 Tbsp of sugar, agave nectar, or maple syrup to the mix.

2 cups blue corn flour, preferably whole grain (I like Arrowhead Mills, available at Whole Foods)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup AP flour
3/4 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder (more if you want thicker pancakes, but for the pork, I like them thinner)
4 cups milk, 2% to whole
2 sticks (1/2 pound) butter, melted and cooled slightly
4 eggs

1. Mix the flours, baking powder, and salt in a bowl.
2. Whisk the milk, butter, and eggs until well combined. Pour over the dry ingredients and beat just until moistened with no visible lumps. Cook on electric griddle or skillet as you would regular pancakes, on one side until brown at the edges, then flip and cook roughly half as long on the second side. If the pancakes aren’t cooking through, you can thin the batter slightly with a little more milk, or reduce the heat on the griddle.

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→ March 22, 2010
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Las Vegas and Utah eats.

I had a quick run through Vegas and Utah last week to see Kris Bryant and Marcus Littlewood and ate pretty well overall, with only one bad meal and a few gems in Utah.

First meal in Vegas was west of the Strip at Yassou Greek Grill on West Charleston, serving gyros, hummus, and other basic Greek items at very reasonable prices. Their lemon-herb chicken is heavily marinated and has a strong flavor without any compromise in the texture, and the pitas they use in their gyros are soft and thick, nothing like the dry pitas you get at the grocery store. The gyro passed my tzatziki test – when I held it perpendicular to the table, I didn’t get any glops of tzatziki, which means they sauced it properly. That gyro plus a side Greek salad and rice pilaf (just rice prepared pilaf-style, with no other ingredients) ran about $8.30 before tax and drink.

I’ve been to the original Mesa Grill location in Manhattan but haven’t had a chance to get back in nearly two years, so I dropped into the Caesar’s Palace location on this trip and decided to branch out, trying two appetizers and a dessert, for research purposes, of course. The blue corn pancake with barbecued duck was dominated by the flavor of the hoisin sauce on the duck; hoisin’s sticky-sweet flavor and texture make it the elephant on the plate, and in this case it wiped out the flavor of the duck itself. I liked the presentation and am certainly a fan of shredded meat in a crepe or pancake, but all I tasted here was hoisin. The creamy wild Mushroom Grits with poached egg, charred serrano sauce, cotija cheese, and blue corn tortilla were better, very creamy as advertised, with only the serrano sauce (which tasted largely of burn) failing to add something to the dish. For dessert, the bartender recommended the churros with chocolate dipping sauce, which were the second-best I’ve had, behind only the version at Toro in Boston.

One bad meal on the trip was at the highly-touted Hash House a Go-Go in Imperial Palace, one of two locations in Vegas. I went for breakfast and ordered the top hash on the menu, a roasted chicken hash with rosemary and asparagus. The dish was incredibly dry, especially the chicken, all white meat and often inedibly tough. Great concept – who doesn’t love a good hash? – but horrid execution.

I made a day trip to St. George, Utah, from Vegas – just under two hours each way, including a very cool drive through the Virgin River Gorge – and had an unbelievable lunch at the Painted Pony, which I would say is in “downtown St. George” except that there doesn’t seem to be much to it besides downtown. The Painted Pony is the sort of local restaurant of which Gordon Ramsay would approve, at least for lunch, with simple dishes focusing on fresh, vibrant flavors. Their torta ahogada sandwich comes on this absolutely perfect ciabatta-style roll and features roasted beef tenderloin, caramelized onions, bell peppers, and cotija cheese, with a rich red sauce on the side, so the sandwich becomes a sort of New Mexican take on French Dip. The side salad was also fresh, with walnuts and julienned apples, and none of the wilted leaves that often plague mixed greens.

I skipped their opulent desserts to hit up Croshaw’s Pies on the, um, west side of town, which was a good call. Their “very berry” pie is sweet-tart with its mix of raspberries and blackberries, and the crust was soft and butter, more tender than flaky, which is how I prefer my pie crusts anyway. It didn’t have great structure, since the filling wept slightly on to the plate, but the compensation was that it didn’t have the slightly gluey texture that comes from using too much cornstarch. Croshaw’s recently opened a second location in Mesa, Arizona, on Brown Road well east of the Cubs’ facilities.

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