→ April 15, 2025
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Raleigh-Durham eats, 2025 edition.

I had one of the best meals of my life in Raleigh last week, so much so that I opened up my Notes app and started writing down every restaurant that made me say the same thing, ending up with about 15 of them (which will eventually become a post here) of which I could remember the names and the meals. This dinner came at Figulina, an Italian restaurant that focuses on fresh pastas and a lot of traditional ingredients, while the recipes run the gamut from the very traditional (a straight pasta alla carbonara with guanciale, the ideal cured pork for that dish) to the modern. Chef-owner David Ellis was previously chef de cuisine at Ashley Christensen’s Poole’s Diner, located just a few blocks away. Every single thing I ate was superb, the cocktails were also outstanding, and the service was just exemplary across the board. I even thought about going back a second time on this trip to try more things before I realized that was a little silly and also I didn’t have time.

I ordered a little out of my usual comfort zone because I figured this was a rare chance to try some things I don’t eat often or even see much on menus. For a starter, I had the salt cod tartine, and if you gave me two of those it would be the most divine and complete lunch. I like baccalà, the dried salt cod pioneered by Basque sailors and still popular across southern Europe, although I had to acquire the taste. This dish mixes the salt cod, which is rinsed and prepared to remove the preserving salt and reduce the fishiness of the flavor, with artichoke leaves, parsley, onion, some extremely good olive oil, and a light touch of vinegar and serves the combination on a thick slice of crusty bread from nearby Boulted Bread. It was bright and balanced, with the cod present in the flavor but not overwhelming with its saltiness. I’ve had salt cod a few ways, but never like this, and actually never in a cold preparation that I liked.

For my main, I had the cappelletti with gorgonzola dolce, served with walnut pesto, fig mostarda, and fresh rosemary. I don’t care for blue cheese in general, not on principle but because I have never become accustomed to the signature flavor of those cheeses, which my palate (and my nose) will forever interpret as “spoiled.” My bartender assured me that the filling of their pasta was a mixture of house-made ricotta and gorgonzola dolce, and that the blue cheese flavor is subtle because there is so much else going on in the dish. (I also knew that if I was ever going to like or tolerate a blue cheese, it was probably gorgonzola dolce; dolce means sweet, and this cheese is aged far less than most blue cheeses, so it’s nowhere near as pungent.) I took the leap of faith and followed his advice to try to get every element in each bite – one of the little hats of pasta, a good bit of the walnut sauce, and some of the dollops of fig mostarda. He was right about everything; I’m struggling to describe the overall flavor because it contained such a broad array of different flavors and notes that worked together so that, no, you don’t get a big hit of blue cheese or of the vinegar in the mostarda. The best comparison I can offer is the perfect cheese board, where you pair a creamy young cheese with a fruit paste and some toasted nuts, but with the glory of fresh pasta involved too. And rosemary. Their menu changes often but I hope this one sticks around for the season.

I have largely been skipping dessert while traveling because I just don’t need it or even crave it like I used to, but given how good the first two items were, I had to give it a look. They had three desserts, one of which held no interest for me and the other contained an ingredient that I’ve had an allergic reaction to twice (although I’m not sure it was the culprit), so I settled on the Bakewell tart, a very not-Italian dessert that I only know because my wife has made it a few times. Figulina’s version was traditional, and rich, so much so that I had just half and … uh … had the rest with lunch the next day. I think it was less sweet than others I’ve had, but I’ve found that’s typical in a lot of fine-dining desserts.

Then there were the cocktails … I told the bartender that I enjoy a Negroni, but that I saw they had an extensive collection of amari (potable bitters, like Montenegro and Cynar), so would he be interested in concocting a negroni-like drink for me? I’ve done this now and then at bars and always get a good response, plus I get to try new things. He did, and it was good … but the better drink was their Escape from Manhattan, containing barrel-aged Conniption gin, Mancino rosso sweet vermouth, and Cardamaro. Cardamaro is a cardoon-based amaro, similar to Cynar but less artichokey; the Conniption gin is 94 proof and is aged ten months in bourbon barrels, although to be honest I’m not sure that last bit is a good thing in gin. Anyway, it was sort of a cross between a Negroni and a Manhattan, but better, less sweet than either drink, with some nice bitter notes and a strong base of herbal flavors. (I’m pretty sure he used Cardamaro in the Negroni riff he made for me as well.)

Anything beyond that will probably seem a bit anticlimactic, I suppose. The second-best meal I had was actually tacos from a gas station in Cary – Taqueria La Esquina, which runs a decent-sized kitchen in a Shell station. I tried their pork al pastor and chicken, which both come with cilantro and grilled onions, with the pork the better of the two; both were good but the chicken was a little dry, while the pork retained its moisture and generally had more flavor to it, although neither was spicy at all. Their menu runs a little heavy on red meat, so it’s not ideal for me (I don’t eat beef at all).

I found them because they were just up the street from Milos, a little coffee shop that has just ordinary espresso drinks with Illy beans but offers single-origin pour-overs from different roasters. I’m still a big fan of Jubala over in Raleigh, but Milos is closer to the USA Baseball Complex, which is often where I’m headed anyway.

Located right in downtown Durham, Bar Virgile does classic cocktails and a simple gastropub menu. They do a classic daiquiri, just rum, lime, and simple syrup, which isn’t hard to make but which I think has lost its luster because of fruity, blended nonsense that has appropriated the name. Hemingway liked them, and I don’t think he was sitting poolside with a giant glass of slushy mango juice and rum. Anyway, I don’t know why I ordered fish and chips when I was kind of feeling like getting something light, but it was the right choice – Bar Virgile’s version has just a light breading, and the cod could not have been more perfectly cooked, enough so that I ended up eating most of it with a fork because I couldn’t pick it up. I was having dinner with my friend from middle school, and after we went across the foyer to their cocktail bar, Annexe, where I had a drink called the Lazy Monk that was clearly their twist on a Last Word, using gin, génépy, Luxardo maraschino, lime, and a rosemary-thyme simple syrup. With green Chartreuse becoming hard to find, everyone’s looking for alternatives – Luxardo has one called Del Santo that gets good reviews from folks who use it in a Last Word – and this was a great twist, with the syrup bringing herbal notes to the front but not enough to throw off the drink and make it too sweet. It’s not a Last Word, which is one of my favorite cocktails ever, but it’s damn good. I got to Durham a little early after an aborted attempt to go to Blacksburg (the game was rained out about 90 minutes into my drive), and parked at Yonder Coffee, located inside The Daily, to have some tea and sit for a little bit. They have a credible selection of teas available, including hojicha, my favorite green tea – the leaves are roasted, so it’s less grassy than most green teas.

I tried Big Dom’s Bagel Shop, which is only open Wednesday through Sunday, and then only until they sell out. The everything bagel was covered with seeds and salt, and it had the right consistency in the center and enough chew to the crust. I ordered an egg sandwich, and the eggs came in one of those pre-cooked blocks of scrambled eggs, which, fine, I’m here for the bagels, but I feel like a good bagel deserves better than that.

One Blacksburg restaurant to mention – Café Mekong, a pan-Asian spot in a strip mall a little south of downtown. They clearly do a thriving take-out business, although their handful of tables were full the whole time I was there. The papaya salad was standard-issue, just average, but their Singapore noodles were a 55.

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→ April 9, 2025
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Nashville and Knoxville eats, 2025 edition.

The last two weekends saw me head to two different spots in Tennessee, so here’s my food roundup, starting with Nashville…

Rozé Pony is an all-day restaurant, café, and bar maybe ten minutes southwest of downtown Nashville, and it was packed with day-drinkers when I was there, including one very large party there for some sort of celebration. I had just come from Florida, where eating reasonably healthy food is a challenge, so I ordered a fish sandwich with a side salad. The sandwich was called, unfortunately, the sloppy salmon. (They can’t stop you from ordering a glass of water.) It was tremendous, with salsa negra, a lemon mayo (aioli, whatever), and charred or roasted peppers. It was pretty sloppy to eat, but I inhaled the thing, and the leaves in the salad looked and tasted extremely fresh.

Maiz de la Vida is a food truck turned high-end Mexican restaurant in the South Gulch neighborhood; what I had was very good, but I really wish 1) I’d ordered differently and 2) I could have tried some of their cocktails, but I never drink before games, obviously. I tried the chips with three salsas at my server’s recommendation, and two of the three salsas were excellent, especially the salsa norteña with habaneros; the chips were house-made, but some were too thick or just otherwise greasy and not that pleasant to eat. The duck breast in mole was outstanding, perfectly cooked, with a rich, smoky, just faintly spicy mole negro, served on a very small bed of diced sweet potatoes with a dry cracker made from egg whites and sesame seeds. On its own, it is delicious, but the dish needs something else besides the meat – I expected more vegetables/starch on the side of it, and had no idea that’s all I was getting, or I would have ordered something else. It’s not how I prefer to eat, and because of my metabolic disorder it’s not great for me to eat a meal that’s very high in protein relative to everything else, so it’s a me problem, not a Maiz problem. I’ll go back, after a game, and I’ll order a bunch of different things.

Little Hats pitches itself as an Italian market & deli, and they do have the dry goods you’d expect, but the sandwich I got was all wrong. They have a prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, tomato, and basil sandwich, a combo I usually can’t resist, as it’s basically a caprese salad on bread with a slice or two of prosciutto crudo, which adds salt and fat to the equation. Little Hats’ version treats the prosciutto like it’s deli ham, stacking it over a half-inch thick, so it overpowers everything else on the sandwich, and it’s also really tough. Prosciutto crudo, which is cured for months and never cooked, is sliced extremely thinly because the extensive dehydration from the curing makes it tough to chew if it’s thicker. I couldn’t even finish this, which seemed criminal.

I resisted the urge to go to Barista Parlor as I usually do, meeting a colleague at Steadfast Coffee instead; it’s a local roastery that appears to be mostly wholesale business (at least based on their site), and unusual for a third-wave (or -adjacent) shop in that they offered free refills on drip coffee. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what blend they used that day, but it was pretty balanced, medium-bodied trending towards the lighter end, without any really distinctive notes.

Attaboy is a second outpost of the speakeasy-ish cocktail bar of the same name in Manhattan, founded by Sam Ross, creator of the paper plane and penicillin cocktails; and Michael McIlroy, creator of the greenpoint cocktail. You have to knock on the door and someone will take you in if there’s room, although there’s no secret password required. The bar has no menu; your bartender will ask what sort of spirits or drinks you like and will make or create something for you. I had two different bartenders and tried two different drinks. The first was a rum-based drink with an amaro that was like Averna, but not actually Averna, and the drink ended up a little too sweet for me. The second was a riff on the last word, one of my absolute favorite cocktails, called a Wordsmith, made with rum rather than gin, and in this case using an aperitivo called Doladira that has rhubarb in place of the green Chartreuse. I’d drink that every day until my liver gave out.

The following weekend found me in Knoxville, where I got to walk around downtown for the first time even though I’d been there twice before. It’s a great and booming downtown core, with quite a few restaurants, a ton of coffee shops (I counted six within a two-block area, I think), and bars.

Kaizen was on Eater’s list of the dozen best restaurants in Knoxville, but it was really disappointing. The menu is great, and I ordered three items since I hadn’t had lunch while traveling, but the best of the three was actually the salad: arugula, beets, carrots, a soft-boiled egg, with a sesame-ginger dressing. I tried one of their steamed buns ($3.50 a pop), with fried chicken, but it was really chewy, and the kimchi smeared on it didn’t add any flavor at all. The duck leg fried rice seemed so promising, with duck confit deep-fried till crispy, an over-medium egg, and the rice, but the rice was DOA with the cause of death drowning by soy sauce, and they fried the duck for too long so it started to dry out. Great concept, poor execution.

Stir is an all-day restaurant, at least on the weekends, and their brunch came recommended by multiple people. I’m definitely less adventurous first thing in the morning, but also, seeing Waffle Houses everywhere made me just want a waffle, and not one from a Waffle House (or, worse, a hotel lobby one). Stir’s are good, clearly just made, pretty tender, although it’s odd that it came with the syrup already on it. I got the version with eggs and potatoes, rather than the version with fried chicken, and the over-medium eggs were spot on. The potatoes were nicely crisped but could have used more salt.

For coffee, I hit up Awaken, which is also downtown, around the corner from Kaizen and Stir. They use coffee from Quills in Louisville, a good roaster albeit not my favorite up there (that’s Sunergos). Cute space, solid espresso, credit to the barista for asking if I liked more foam in my macchiato (it was just right).

I stopped at The Vault, a cocktail bar downstairs from the restaurant Vida, where I’d eaten last year, and ordered a Last Word … and that was enough for one night, as it was larger than I expected and a second might have knocked me out. Their house versions of classics all contain too many extra ingredients, though; you don’t have to modify the Negroni or the Manhattan with three more spirits, they’re classics for a reason. It’s a cool space and I was disappointed it wasn’t busier on a Saturday night, when you’d think more people would be out and might appreciate a higher-end place to drink.

I also returned to A Dopo Sourdough Pizza, since I loved it last year; I changed it up a little, going with their “rucchetta” pizza, with arugula and Parmiggiano-Reggiano on a margherita, and added prosciutto crudo. Believe it or not, there was way too much Parmiggiano on it to the point that I scooped some off with my fork because I couldn’t taste anything else. It may be the king of all cheeses, but it’s also basically a salt-fat-umami bomb, and I could barely make out the other flavors. It’s such an odd thing to do because that’s such an expensive ingredient, too. The dough was outstanding, though. I skipped the gelato this year, as I’ve kind of been off desserts while traveling now.

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→ March 29, 2025
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Florida eats, 2025 edition.

Atmosphere Pizzeria is located in a strip mall in Sarasota and looks like absolutely nothing from the outside – I wasn’t sure I was even in the right place – but this is real Neapolitan pizza. They ferment their dough over three days, and the oven is right there in the front of the bare-bones restaurant. The menu has a variety of red and white pizzas; I went with the red one with mozzarella di bufala, mushrooms, basil, and prosciutto di Parma. The dough and the prosciutto were the stars here; there’s a ton of air in the dough and the texture is almost exactly what you’d find in Italy, while the prosciutto is sliced to order and is almost translucently thin. The pizza itself actually needed a little salt, and I think it was because the mushrooms weren’t seasoned – they were clearly cooked before they went on the pizza, as they have to be, since the 90 seconds or so that it takes to cook a Neapolitan pizza isn’t enough to extract the water from a sliced mushroom, let alone cook it. Whenever I go back, I might just go for the margherita and let the dough carry the day.

Sage Biscuit Café seemed to be the best-regarded breakfast spot in Bradenton, and, I mean, it has “biscuit” in the name … but I can make a better biscuit than that. This was more like a scone, really, crumbly and dry. I give them credit for cooking the eggs somewhere close to over medium and erring more on the easy side than the overdone side.

Orange Blossom Café looks like a disaster for coffee, since you walk in and it seems to be about everything but coffee. They use beans from Banyan Roasters, however, which is probably the best local roaster in this part of Florida, and have two varieties available in airports, a medium roast and a dark one. Banyan has a shop here but it was well out of my way, the opposite of the way I needed to go on my way to IMG.

Indigenous comes up on any list of the best restaurants in the Sarasota area, and they’re particularly known for their fresh fish dishes, which change daily based on what comes into the kitchen; their parmiggiano beignets; and their mushroom soup. I ordered the beignets, and then chose the lentil-mushroom Bolognese with pappardelle after asking the server whether she’d go with that or the red snapper. The beignets were excellent, if a touch greasy, but the Bolognese was disappointing on two levels. The obvious one is that the pasta was overcooked. The pappardelle itself was rolled too thinly, but it was well beyond al dente, to the point that the ribbons were coming apart as I picked them up with my fork. The less obvious one is that, at least in my opinion, pappardelle isn’t ideal for a chunky, heart sauce like Bolognese – real, which would contain pork and veal, or imitation like this one. Thick ribbons can stand up to the thickness of the sauce, but the ribbons aren’t really capable of picking up all of the bits in the sauce, whether they’re lentils and finely diced vegetables or ground meats. I haven’t made the dish in ages, but I’d opt for something like rigatoni or conchiglie, something that can trap the sauce so you can easily get both pasta and sauce in each bite. That’s not a universal opinion – pappardelle with Bolognese is a common combination – and maybe I wouldn’t have minded if this was thicker and not overcooked.

ofKors is a Ukrainian-owned bakery in downtown Sarasota that serves filled crepes, bagels, and a massive assortment pastries along with espresso drinks. The bagels looked promising – obviously looks can deceive, even in food, but you can usually spot a round-bread imitation with a little experience – and this was about as good a bagel as you’re going to find outside of greater New York. They cook the eggs to order on the crepe maker, which was kind of mesmerizing to watch (I was sure it was all going to run off the sides, but I shouldn’t have doubted the woman working the station, she’s a professional). I don’t know where they get the smoked salmon, but I’m guessing it’s a local vendor – it was excellent, with a soft texture and pronounced smoke flavor. I didn’t get coffee there because I wanted to go back to Perq, where I hadn’t been since before the pandemic; they were clearly understaffed that day, so it wasn’t quite up to my memories of the place, but the coffee itself is still excellent. I’m usually a macchiato fan, but I wanted to stick to the listed options because they were so harried (I wonder if someone called in sick), so I ordered a Gibraltar, which is basically a cortado but British.

Pangea Alchemy Lab is a tiny cocktail bar accessible from an alley just south of Main Street in Sarasota, and it’s fantastic, exactly what I want in a cocktail bar – it’s small, intimate, with a small menu of custom cocktails and riffs on classics, with a well-stocked bar of liquors and liqueurs. The custom cocktail list changes seasonally; when I visited, there were two rum drinks on the menu, and I tried both, naturally. The first had Brugal 1888, a double-aged rum (meaning it’s aged in two types of casks) from the Dominican Republic, with Licor 43 and cocoa bitters. The second was their riff on a Maitai, but much less sweet, thank goodness – I don’t think I could drink an actual Maitai any more unless I was on a tropical beach somewhere. It also had Brugal 1888, along with yuzu liqueur, demerara syrup, and orange juice.

Moving on to Fort Myers… Shift Coffee is a tiny spot in an apartment building in the northern part of town, and it’s legit, with beans from two small roasters, one from Florida and one from New York, available as drip coffee or espresso. The blend they were using the day I was there was better as espresso, at least. The space is small, with three two-tops and a couch.

McGregor’s is a perfectly fine breakfast spot that cooked the eggs I ordered perfectly to over medium, but everything else was kind of meh. The server – who saw me doing the Spelling Bee and couldn’t wait to tell me about how she does Strands and Wordle but the Connections puzzle is too hard – recommended their biscuits, which they make from scratch every morning, but that was a hard miss. It was drier than a scone, and I do not understand how so many places fuck up a simple southern biscuit. Alton Brown’s got a great recipe. So does my employer’s Cooking site, although I think biscuits are best with a shortening/butter mix. Just don’t overcook them.

Backyard Social is a great concept for a space – there are eight food trucks ringing the building, which is open on all sides, with a huge bar in the middle and some games for families to play, although the crowd definitely leaned a little older given all the alcohol involved. I got a blackened grouper sandwich at Atlas Dock Company; the fish was fantastic but for some reason they sliced the fish instead of serving the whole fillet, which meant it was constantly falling out of the sandwich. I don’t know if it just fell apart on the grill and they were trying to salvage it; it tasted great but I must have looked like a lunatic while trying to eat it. (I’d read that Dixie’s was the best fish spot in Fort Myers, but when I called before driving down that way they said the wait was an hour and a half.)

Cubans Be Like is hidden in an outdoor mall, tucked back off the main walkway, and there are enough empty storefronts there that I’m impressed they get any business at all. I saw they had lechon asado (Cuban roast pork) on the menu and I hadn’t had that in years, so I figured I’d give it a shot, and the plate easy had two servings’ worth of pork on it. I am not a large man and I don’t eat a ton of red meat any more, so maybe my scale is different, but that was a ridiculously generous portion. It was well cooked, but oddly a little underpowered; the pork is marinated in a garlic-citrus base and tends to be sharp, tangy, and salty, but this lechon was the mildest thing on the plate – I got the black beans & rice and sweet plantains as sides, and those were both much more flavorful. I’ve had much better.

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→ March 21, 2025
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Arizona eats, March 2025 edition.

The best thing I ate at any new (to me) restaurant this week was chicken, oddly enough. Mister Pio is a small Peruvian chicken spot in Arcadia that has a barebones menu: half chicken, quarter chicken, chicken sandwich, fries, drinks. The chicken comes with a side salad and aji verde sauce. The chicken is really incredible; I read online that it’s dry-brined with a mix of 21 spices (and then some) for two days, then it’s cooked for an hour and a half on a rotisserie over coals, but man, it’s just about perfect. It’s salty and deeply savory, and any fat under the skin has long rendered out, so the skin itself is paper-thin and just covered in flavor from the dry rub and the smoke, while the meat itself is extremely tender and juicy. The fries are fried to order (or at least mine were) and they’re properly salty. Mister Pio is only open noon to 8 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Make a point of going if you’re anywhere in the vicinity – they’re less than 15 minutes from ASU’s park and not that much farther from Scottsdale.

Mensho Ramen is a Japanese chain that has three locations in California and now two in the Valley, one in Phoenix (where I went) and one in Mesa. Their menu is very simple, with just two broth types, one from chicken and one vegan, although the predominant protein across the entire menu is beef, specifically A5 Wagyu. I had their signature ramen, replacing the Wagyu with extra duck, although the pork was the best of the three proteins (there’s also chicken). This is really about the broth, which is as rich and savory as a typical tonkotsu broth, and the noodles, which are a little thicker than you might normally find, and are truly al dente. There’s less extra stuff in the bowl unless you chose more add-ins, but it doesn’t need anything more than the noodles and broth if the goal is flavor – and I say that as someone who likes all of the stuff you can typically add to ramen, like fish cakes or mushrooms or bamboo shoots. This is just exceptionally good, umami-rich broth, and I would guess it’s hard to mess up when you start with a base that good.

Uchi recently opened an outpost in Scottsdale, the seventh location of the award-winning sushi & Japanese restaurant by Beard winner Tyson Cole, whose first location is still going in Austin. (Now-disgraced Top Chef winner Paul Qui got his start there as well.) It’s a splurge meal to put it mildly, but this is some of the best raw fish I have ever had anywhere, and the best dishes I had during the omakase were generally the simplest. Highlights included the flounder, the Tasmanian ocean trout, the New Zealand king salmon, and their signature dessert called “fried milk,” which has a dark chocolate ganache, sweet cream ice cream, chocolate wafers, and little fried orbs that taste of coffee and whatever cereal they use that day as the coating. The worst dish was the grilled hamachi collar, which was an enormous portion but slightly overcooked and lacking much flavor on its own. It’s one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had, so even saying “it was worth it” seems hollow, but at the least I can say that you are getting exceptional quality of ingredients for the cost.

Sfizio Modern Italian Kitchen is up north on the 101 just off the Tatum Road exit, run by a Calabrese chef named Rocco (of course). They make their pasta in house, so even though the pizzas looked good (baked in a giant oven right off the dining room), I had to go with the rigatoni alla vodka, which was delicious and different than any version I’ve had before. The sauce was extremely light in color and totally smooth, so I assume it used tomato paste or passata, and had no pork in it, coming with a dollop of fresh ricotta on top. I make it with onion, pancetta or guanciale (or bacon), hand-crushed tomatoes, and basil, so it’s a chunkier sauce with more texture. Vodka sauce isn’t a traditional Italian dish, and there’s a dispute over whether it’s even Italian in origin, so there’s no “right” or authentic way to make it. As long as you don’t overdo the cream, I’m probably going to like it. My friend and I split the focaccia starter, which comes with a delicious pesto-ricotta blend, but the focaccia itself was obviously made that day and served its primary function, sopping up some of the sauce that remained when I finished the pasta. The chef more or less forced me to try the tiramisu for dessert, and I appreciated the fact that it was less sweet than most varieties, with a little more kick from the rum. I do want to go back to try the pizza, though.

The Nach is a food truck parked inside the patio at the bar Sazerac downtown, around the corner from Futuro Coffee and the original (ish) Matt’s Big Breakfast location, serving al pastor, chicken, and shrimp street tacos, burritos, and quesadillas with a few additional items and sides. The chicken was better than the shrimp, with much more flavor to the meat itself, and I would definitely get the $2 guacamole as an add-on, which is more than enough to add to all three tacos and maybe have a little left over. The chicken was salty and slightly tart from its sauce, while the shrimp was perfectly cooked but under seasoned.

Beginner’s Luck is a new all-day outpost from the folks behind Citizen Public House and the Gladly, and eater.com recommended their breakfast in particular. I had their breakfast sandwich, as the server wavered when I asked whether she recommended that or the shakshuka, and it was fine, a good breakfast sandwich, a better iteration of the kind you get at First Watch or the like. I want to try a different meal there before coming to any real judgment but this wasn’t worth returning for breakfast beyond the cool space tucked in an alley just around the corner from Old Town.

I did play more of the hits, so to speak, returning to some old favorites. I went to Citizen Public House for the first time at least since before the pandemic; the menu has changed – the crispy salmon was outstanding, especially the sherry beurre blanc, and they still make the best Negroni for whatever reason – but the vibe is the same. Tacos Chiwas still has the best tacos I’ve had out in the Valley, but I went to Cocina Chiwas again and was disappointed in the food this time around. The menu is more beef-centered than I remembered, and the more vegetable-forward dishes I ordered were underpowered. Pane Bianco is now serving New York-style pizza by the slice, although the day I got there they had already sold out, so I had to suffer through their focaccia-style pizza, which was outstanding as always. Pizzeria Virtu was solid, although everything was maybe a half-grade down from the first time I went there. was I stopped in to Los Altos Public Market for one of their giant shortbread cookies and an agua Fresca, something I haven’t done in years but that I used to do every visit when I first went to ESPN and started coming to Arizona once and then twice a year. I did breakfasts at the Hillside Spot, Crèpe Bar, and Matt’s, as usual. I had coffee at Cartel (twice), Futuro (once, great space but you get some characters in there), and Giant (once), which is my favorite space to sit and write anywhere in the Valley, and Giant’s now using their own beans after they’d switched to ROC, a local roaster that goes darker than I like. I didn’t get to Valentine, which was recommended to me by two different baseball people, but that’s on the hit list for the next trip.

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→ March 9, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

  • Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.
  • The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.
  • Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.
  • Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.
  • Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.
  • People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

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→ March 4, 2025
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Arlington & San Antonio eats.

Just some smaller eats of note this time, with two spots I particularly wanted to mention. The first was a very unassuming Lebanese restaurant called Beirut Grill that’s about ten minutes from Globe Life Field. That might be the best baba ghanouj I have ever had, and if not, it’s very close. It was smoky, garlicky, and incredibly bright, and I almost could have made a meal of that alone, as I think the appetizer portion was one entire eggplant and came with five or six large, warm pitas. I did, however, order an actual main course, the tawook sandwich with shish tawook (marinated, grilled chunks of chicken breast) with tomatoes, parsley, and toum (garlic sauce) wrapped in a thin bread that I think was markook, since it was thinner than a pita or laffa. The chicken was still juicy and had the brightness of the lemon juice in the marinade, and the toum … well, it’s mostly garlic, so I’m a fan, but that’s the sort of thing you’ll probably love or hate. Those two items plus a sparking water came to about $19 before tip. I’ve been thinking about the baba ghanouj for three days now.

I was in San Antonio for part of the day on Saturday and found a food hall in the city called Make Ready, where I ate at Four Brothers, a Venezuelan food stand that sells arepas – two for $12.99, to be precise, so I got one with chicken and one vegan one with black beans, both with sliced avocado, maduros (sweet plantains), garlic sauce, onions, and more. The chicken one was so stuffed it fell apart before I could finish it, but that was the winner of the two, just because the chicken itself had so much flavor, smoky and salty and a tiny bit spicy. The vegan arepa was perfectly fine, but it missed the extra flavors from the sauce on the chicken itself. I’m trying to eat less meat in general, but on both my trips to Texas in the last three weeks, I’ve had narrow windows to eat, and usually that means chicken is involved somehow. I also got the yucca fries, but I’d give those a miss; they definitely needed more salt, but also they just weren’t necessary given the size of the two arepas.

I revisited Smoke ‘n Ash, the Ethiopian/Texas BBQ fusion spot in south Arlington that earned a writeup in the New York Times two years ago, and ended up ordering almost the same thing I did last July, with some small modifications. I will say having had the chicken and the ribs both with and without the Ethiopian awaze seasoning, I’d pay the upcharge to add it every time. Without is good; with is divine. I tried the ye’abasha gomen, listed on the menu as vegan collard greens to distinguish them from the “beefy collard greens,” which I believe contain beef. I’ve never had collards like these and I honestly don’t know how I feel about them; they’re very gingery, with garlic, cardamom, and coriander, so they also come across as very earthy in flavor. The collards themselves were extremely well cooked, tender but not mushy, and the whole thing had plenty of salt; it’s also just possible that it didn’t meld well with the other flavors on the plate. I still love this place and wish there were more things for me to try.

I’ll also vouch again for Nehemiah Coffee, a local coffee shop maybe 7-8 minutes from Globe Life up on Lamar. They’re open till 10 pm and serve some food and some beer and wine later in the day; their coffee is the best I’ve had in the area, and I really love their simple breakfast sandwich because of the chipotle aioli they put on it. It’s also a very appealing space in which to sit and work or read or just relax, because it’s open and gets a lot of natural light through the windows. That’s become my morning stop every time I’m in Arlington now.

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→ January 12, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 1/12/25.

I took a month or so off from these Saturday posts, mostly because I was busy just about every weekend in December – PAX Unplugged, hosting two holiday parties, getting ready for Christmas, then traveling. I do plan to return these to their normal format, but for now I’m doing a briefer one just to get one posted after I was out of town for the weekend (we went to NYC to see friends and to watch SIX).

I did have one story up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, covering the Gavin Lux trade and associated signing by the Dodgers of Hyeseong Kim.

Over at Paste, my review of the excellent board game Tower Up went up this past week; that game appeared on my list of the top ten games of 2024.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Defector’s exhaustive history of the barely-a-company Color Star, which first appeared on anyone’s radar when they signed a partnership deal with the 76ers in 2021 that the team quickly rescinded, is completely bizarre and an amazing piece of investigative work. The short version is that the company looks like it’s been running some kind of stock scam for at least five years, and has never produced any actual product or service.
  • The New Yorker has the story of one author’s copyright infringement lawsuit alleging another author, an editor, and a publisher stole the plot and many key details from of one of her unpublished novels, which delves into the question of how far you can copy an idea before it might cross into infringement, but also explains the anti-literary world of “romantasy” and other fast-fashion books that are written to chase trends on TikTok and other social media.
  • ProPublica published an exposé from and about a man who, on his own, infilitrated multiple right-wing militias, collecting data on members and recording conversations with leaders. He believes they’ll take the country down if they’re not stopped soon.
  • Dogs who press buttons to ‘talk’ to their owners are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. Is there any science behind this? I’m a strong skeptic here, and I think the experts quoted in this New York Times Magazine piece lean that way as well, although there are experiments underway to try to understand better what dogs really can understand and express.
  • Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after the paper refused to run a cartoon she drew that depicted billionaires bending the knee to the incoming President. She explained why on her Substack.
  • Coffee futures prices hit record highs in December and haven’t come down much thanks to below-average rainfall in Brazil and bad weather in Vietnam, the two largest coffee producers in the world. Between weather, climate change, and rising demand, coffee futures prices are up over 75% in the last year.
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→ November 13, 2024
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NYC eats, November 2024.

My work trip to New York didn’t quite go as planned, but I did eat well. My first stop was at San Matteo, a pizzeria on the Upper East Side that I found because my mom emailed me this Italian list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. (with other lists for other regions/countries plus a global one). I don’t agree with a lot of the list – excluding Pizzeria Bianco yet including Pizzeria Pomo is inexplicable – but I’ve been to 15 and all of them are at least a 55. I’ve got my work cut out for me, though. Anyway, San Matteo looks completely ordinary, like your typical New York Italian-American restaurant, with a massive menu that only gets to pizza on the last page. I got the porcini tartufo pizza, a white pie with fresh mozzarella, porcini mushrooms, Parmiggiano Reggiano, and truffle oil, as none of the red pies was especially grabbing me, although it didn’t matter – the star of this show is the dough, one of the lightest I have ever tasted on any pizza of any style. It is Neapolitan, recognizably so at the edges and with a damp center, but this dough was as airy as a meringue. It’s not that it has giant air bubbles; the whole texture is pillowy soft, yet doesn’t lose the slight tang you get from long fermentation. The porcinis were excellent – I’m glad they used those rather than cremini, as porcini have a ‘meatier’ flavor thanks to their high concentration of glutamates – and while truffle oil is generally a big meh for me, it was definitely good quality olive oil. They also make a very solid Negroni, still among my absolute favorite cocktails. (I’m becoming a Manhattan guy, though. I think it’s age.)

So by sheer coincidence, my sister, who lives in northern Virginia, was also in Manhattan for a meetup with some friends, and she texted me the pin of her hotel … which was at the same intersection as mine. There are over 100 hotels in Manhattan, and we happened to end up at two hotels located at literally the same pair of cross streets. Anyway, we had a lovely lunch on Saturday at Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant, by which I mean the country in the Caucasus, not the American state, although both seem to have a desire to roll back civil rights. Aragvi’s menu comprises traditional Georgian classics, and I think we ended up with three of the big ones, acknowledging that I’d never had Georgian food before and actually did a little reading before we went so I might know what we were eating. We started with a plain cheese khachapuri – extremely similar to the Turkish dish peinirli if you’ve had that – which is a baked bread bowl that had three cheeses melted in the center along with an egg yolk and a small knob of butter. I only knew one of the cheeses, feta, but the combination reminded me of a mixture of mozzarella and ricotta salata, and I think it’s an enriched dough given the texture and outside color. I’d eat this every day if it wouldn’t kill me. We also got a plate of cheese khinkali, which are Georgian dumplings akin to pierogis, shaped like giant xiao long bao – sorry, I’m not even sure what to italicize any more – with what I can only describe as ricotta inside. They were fantastic but absolutely enormous and our best efforts only got us through three of them. The final dish was chicken mtsvadi, and you’re god-damned right I copied and pasted that word from their website, grilled chicken thighs with the texture of smoked meat, served with pickled cabbage and fresh onions and parsley on one bit of lavash bread and a red sauce of unknown origin. (I think it was adjika, although it was a 0 on the spice scale.) This was a welcome change from all of the cheese we’d been eating, although I wish they’d brought more lavash or other bread to make eating the meat with the toppings easier. All told, though, I am now a fan of Georgian cuisine. They do also have a list of Georgian wines, and I got a white that, like Michael Scott, I couldn’t name for you. It was medium-bodied and kind of crisp, better than the full-bodied one the server had me try that had an overwhelming green apple flavor.

Moving along rapidly … Saturday dinner with a grad school classmate (wu-hoo!) came at Abbey Tavern, which is his favorite spot in Manhattan, and they do Guinness properly – it wasn’t too cold, so I could really taste the beer. Guinness is one of the only mass-market beers I would actively choose to drink, because I think it tastes good – it is more than an alcohol delivery device. And it goes well with fish and chips, which was my order, and which was also really solid, with my only real complaints being that 1) it was way too much food and 2) they didn’t bring malt vinegar, although to be fair I didn’t ask because we were busy talking. I hadn’t seen this friend since our 20th reunion back in 2019, and I missed the 25th because it was the weekend of my daughter’s prom, and while I was super bummed to miss the reunion I made the right choice. Back to the food, I demolished the fries, and ate two of three very generous fillets of cod, super crisp and well seasoned, as well as extremely hot when they hit the table.

Sunday morning was the day of the one game I went to, so I loaded up by walking the 15 minutes to Tal’s Bagels on the east side, which was on my employer’s recent list of the best bagels in the city, of which I had been to exactly none. (Zucker’s was my favorite to this point, and might still be.) I figured I likely wouldn’t get lunch at the ballpark, so I went all out with an egg, bacon, and hash brown sandwich (no cheese) on an everything bagel. You probably only care about the bagel, and the truth is it was fuckin’ awesome. I would eat that bagel every day. This is why I love New York – you eat stuff there that makes you think the rest of your life is being frittered away on subpar food. I don’t know if this is the best bagel in New York or Manhattan or in Midtown, but I know it satisfied my innate need for a real New York bagel. Also, not to get too far afield here, but I generally don’t ‘combine’ starches – potatoes on pizza is almost as much of an abomination to me as pineapple is – yet this one absolutely worked. The crispy hash browns offered a textural contrast to the soft interior of the bagel. Win.

My last meal before leaving the city came at Empanada Mama on the west side, and the company was Joe Sheehan, whom I’ve known for twenty-plus years but hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. Joe mentioned this is a longtime favorite of his, and as you may have figured out from reading me for years or just from reading this one post, I will eat almost anything if it is somehow wrapped in dough. I tried three different varieties and my favorite was the Bombay, a wheat-flour empanada filled with curried chicken and chickpeas. The curry flavor was light, clearly there but more of a supporting player, and the chicken and beans were balanced too, which is what I wanted since I also got the very meaty Reggaeton (filled with pernil, a form of roast pork). The corn flour-based rice-and-beans missed the mark a little because of the crust – the filling was fine but the texture of the crust was off for me. I was also pretty full before I even started that one, so keep that in mind.

For coffee, I went to two longtime favorites, Culture Espresso and Blue Bottle, the latter because I think their espresso is still a pinnacle of the form, with an inherent sweetness to their beans that few others can match. (Archetype in Omaha has hit that mark too.) I was a little disappointed at Culture, where the barista spooned foam into my espresso macchiato rather than pouring it – I know that’s almost a religious debate at this point, but I think you always want pourable foam. I’ve only seen the spooned foam as standard when I was in England and Wales in 2022, but to me a macchiato means poured foam. I suppose that’s more preference than anything else. Blue Bottle nailed it, of course. I’ve truly never had a bad shot at any of their locations in any city.

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→ November 11, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27th.
  • A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.
  • Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.
  • France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.
  • Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.
  • Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.
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→ September 21, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 9/21/24.

One new post at the Athletic this week, naming Boston’s Kristian Campbell as the Minor League Player of the Year for 2024, along with a bunch of honorable mentions and other honorees as usual. And, as usual, people got very mad that I didn’t mention some prospect from their favorite team. I’ve got a piece coming up Monday on the future of the White Sox given what’s in their farm system and what they’ve shown they can and can’t develop.

You can and should sign up for my free email newsletter, because think of all the worthless crap that’s in your inbox. I promise you my emails are better than the latest email blast from Lands’ End, and they’re much less frequent.

If you missed me on Codenames Live! this week, you can watch the replay here on Twitch. My teammate was the great Daryl Andrews, designer of Sagrada and the brand-new game Mistwind.

And now, the links…

  • Northwestern has suspended Professor of Journalism Steven Thrasher due to his participation in the anti-Gaza War encampments in the spring and pro-Palestine statements he has made elsewhere. Over 1900 journalists, academics, and health professionals signed a letter to the school, saying he has been targeted for his views and what should be protected speech. I’m presenting the story here but acknowledge it may be more complicated than it first seems, as this only presents Thrasher’s side and that of his supporters.
  • The Q-Collar claims it can protect athletes’ brains from concussions and that research “proves” its efficacy. The data may not be real. I don’t see any way this thing could possibly work as claimed.
  • Prof. Deborah Kelly at Penn State has had two papers retracted and a third may be on the way, but she’s lawyered up and is fighting it even though other researchers have found fabricated data or images in 21 of her publications.
  • Paste’s Jim Vorel wrote a defense of the Aviation, a drink that had a brief renaissance about 15 years ago but seems to have lost some of its luster. I’m a fan – it is the only drink I’ve ever seen that uses crème de violette, but those floral notes are a great complement to the juniper flavors of a quality gin. And it’s a good drink to order out in the world because you’re never going to buy crème de violette to make it at home.
  • A Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles, a new game inspired by the roll & write series Railroad Ink, is already over $250,000 in funding. I actually don’t like Railroad Ink, but this looks more up my alley.
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