→ February 17, 2013
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Oklahoma City eats, 2013.

Oklahoma City is a fun town, especially downtown, where there are a few pockets of renewal that have spawned some local restaurants and shops worth visiting. I didn’t get to explore as much as I would have liked, since I had to head out to Norman, Yukon, and Midwest City, but found three places worth strong recommendations.

I returned to Ludivine, which was the star from my visit to OKC last year, and it was even better the second time around. It’s a farm-to-table restaurant with a pretty simple menu – a house-made charcuterie selection, four starters (including salads), four mains, and a few desserts, with everything but the seafood sourced locally. Last time I went with several small plates, but this time one of the entrees was calling me: Walnut Creek mangalitsa pork with potato gnocchi, winter greens (mostly green kale), grana padano, and pork jus with mustard seeds. The gnocchi were a little soft but that contrasted well with the thinly sliced but fully cooked pork (made from a Hungarian breed, related to wild boar, with richer, fattier meat than the common American pig) and the crunch of the curly kale leaves. The broth was the best part of the dish, with the smooth mouth-feel and umami-rich flavor of a stock, but well-balanced with the spice and saltiness of the mustard.

The dessert was even better – a white chocolate and lavender cookie, served warm at the bottom of a ramekin, topped with a chocolate-orange semifreddo, fig syrup, and cassis whipped cream. It’s hard to explain how the dessert worked together, as the whole was far more than the sum of its parts. The lead flavor was dark chocolate, but there were also hints of marshmallow, caramel, and the suggestion of lavender (which I like in tiny doses but which can make a cookie taste like perfume if it’s overdone). This represents culinary artistry to me – the ability to combine ingredients or elements so that, when tasted together, they add up to something greater and unexpected. Ludivine also has a full bar with its own mixologist(s) and had a couple of local beers on tap, including a Coop Gran Sport Porter that I found too cloying and syrupy.

Just a few doors north on Hudson Street is the roastery and cafe Elemental Coffee, a shop for serious coffee snobs, with three different roasts available for pour-overs and their own espresso blend that combines beans from Mexico and Ethiopia. My first test of coffee in any form is whether I can drink it without needing sugar to hide any bitterness or harsh notes, and both the drip and espresso blends (for drip I went with an Ecuadorian bean, their most expensive drip coffee at $3.25) passed. They also have a small selection of food items, including crepes on weekend mornings and a local yogurt/granola combination that, while a little small for breakfast, is excellent, with dried blueberries sprinkled on the plain yogurt and a cinnamon-spiced granola full of sliced almonds and pumpkin seeds. The barista I had on Sunday informed me that Nick Offerman of Parks & Rec loves both Elemental and Ludivine, further validating my selections.

East of downtown in Midwest City, I had some excellent fried chicken at a place that looked like it might need to be condemned, called Jim’s Fried Chicken. It’s nothing to look at on the outside but the chicken was perfectly fried, with a crispy crust that broke at first bite without shattering or falling off the meat. It was well-salted but not otherwise seasoned, at least not at a level I could detect. For $7, I got a drumstick, two thighs, two sides, and a drink; the fried okra was excellent and made to order while the beans-and-rice with sausage were excellent but a little on the spicy side, fine if I was only eating that but on top of fried chicken and fried okra it was a little more than I was looking for.

There isn’t much of a consensus around the best Q joint in Oklahoma City, but as far as I could tell Iron Starr BBQ was one of the contenders, although it’s a table-service restaurant with cloth napkins rather than your stereotypical (and often excellent) one-guy-and-a-smoker kind of place. The server suggested the St. Louis-style ribs and the brisket as their two best smoked meats, and the ribs were pretty special, coming right off the bone but still showing some real tooth, with a mild dry rub that wasn’t too peppery and a pronounced smoke flavor. The brisket was a little too dry and needed the sauce to compensate for that and the limited smoke ring. Iron Starr fries their okra whole rather than cutting it into bite-sized pieces, which is probably a good bit more healthful but left the okra inside slightly undercooked. The braised collard greens were, shockingly, undersalted. The square of jalapeno cornbread that came with the meal was excellent, but different in texture than you’d expect, more like a spoon bread than a crumbly southern cornbread. The “double-chocolate” bread pudding was more like a blondie with chocolate chips in it and a little melted white chocolate on top, too sweet for me to finish even halfway. I had a local beer here as well, Choc OPA (Oklahoma Pale Ale) at the server’s suggestion, but it was overwhelmingly citrusy, more like a wine cooler than a beer. I’d go back for the ribs and cornbread, and maybe to try a different protein, but would skip the brisket even though it’s quite popular.

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→ November 30, 2012
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Hawai’i eats.

I’ve got posts up for Insiders on the Hanson-Walden trade and the Span-Meyer trade, and did a Klawchat yesterday as well.

I’d never set foot in Hawai’i before our vacation there last week, so we spent a lot of time getting oriented and didn’t really start nailing the culinary tourism until the fourth or fifth day there, after which point I found a bunch of spots worth recommending. I’ll get to the food in a moment, but first some quick thoughts on touring Kauai and Oahu in general:

* Kauai was gorgeous; we spent five days there at the Marriott Beach Club in Lihue (everything was via Rewards Points), which has a great pool, including a kiddie pool with a slide, and a beach on a large, calm lagoon. The rooms were nothing special at all, and the food all over the hotel was overpriced. The biggest lesson for us was that it was worthwhile to rent a car at least for a day or two – we drove to Waimea Canyon, also called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific; and Kalalau Point, which overlooks the Napali coast and the northwest shore of the island. The car also allowed us to tour the Kauai Coffee plantation, visit the Koloa Rum Company (and buy a bottle of their dark – pricey at $30, but smooth with a bright vanilla finish), and do a little more shopping.

* The big shocker on Oahu was the traffic – I can see why there’s a local push for a light-rail line into the western suburbs, because traffic on I-H1 (an “interstate” highway) is pretty brutal, and there seemed to be no enforcement of HOV lane restrictions. We stayed out at Ko Olina, so the car was a necessity, and also drove to Sea Life Park so my wife could swim with a dolphin, which was a longtime wish of hers. I can understand people who skip Oahu entirely and fly straight to Maui or Kauai, though – the scenic parts of Oahu are a hike from Honolulu.

I’ve got two food spots to recommend on Oahu, plus one that’s great if you’re up for the price. The Whole Ox Deli isn’t actually a deli but is more of a lunch counter with picnic tables, and reminded me in many ways of our favorite Arizona haunt, The Hillside Spot, for the focus on sourcing local ingredients and making everything from scratch. The Whole Ox got its start via Kickstarter, which raised funds for a smoker that they use to smoke pork shoulder for their pulled pork sandwich, although I ended up getting the porchetta sandwich with cracklins, mustardy mayo, and caramelized fennel, everything in perfect balance on a soft baguette. The fried potatoes are like grown-up french fires, skin-on red potatoes halved or quartered, either steamed or parboiled (I assume) and then fried till brown and crispy all over. This was absolutely worth fighting our way into downtown Honolulu to visit.

So was Downtown Coffee, which is located in the Fort Street Mall, a tiny shop run by a husband-and-wife team who roast their coffees every Saturday and sell a handful of artisan pastries including a matcha torte with bamboo charcoal crust that defied any expectation I’d had – it’s sweet but subtle, without the bitter grassy taste I associate with matcha. As for the coffee, I had a cup of their downtown blend and liked it enough to buy a 7 ounce bag of their beans to try at home as espresso, as well as a smaller bag of their lighter Maui Mokka peaberry roast, on the owner’s suggestion. He was kind enough to spend about 10-15 minutes walking me through all their roasts, showing me samples of five different ones to discuss their qualities for espresso, and even gave me a sample of another drip coffee for comparison’s sake. I’ve already finished off the Maui Mokka, which produced a very smooth shot with a strong crema, a little less assertively acidic than the lighter African roasts I’ve gotten from Intelligentsia.

The one pricey meal we had on Oahu was the result of me being a company man and visiting Disney’s Aulani resort to try their dinner buffet at Makahiki. The resort is gorgeous inside, reminiscent in style of Disney’s Polynesian Resort but more updated with more open space inside. I generally avoid buffets, with two exceptions – Las Vegas and Disney, where the quality is higher and the turnover is faster. Makahiki’s buffet was very broad, with a raw fish table that included poke, sashimi, and oysters on the half-shell; cooked shellfish, including red snow crab legs; a wide selection of meat and vegetable dishes, including Hawaiian purple sweet potatoes both steamed and fried tempura-style; and a dessert table that had molten chocolate cakes that were more molten than cake, making it a great dipping sauce for the fresh berries on the next table. For a buffet, it was great. It also runs $46 per adult and $21 per child, so even with my employee discount we still dropped over $100, including two drinks and tip. They did have a full selection of local beers from Kona, including the Big Wave Golden Ale which had a very pronounced citrus flavor and virtually no bitterness.

Moving over to Kauai, the best meal option at the Marriott is the overpriced Duke’s, which earns raves for a salad bar that is really just a nice salad bar. Their fish was very fresh, and I liked their basmati rice pilaf, but the “hula pie” dessert is incredibly overrated, probably more famous for its size than its taste. We fared much better heading across Rice St to the Feral Pig, a fairly new spot with no ambience but amazing food, including house-smoked bacon and pulled pork and a solid selection of local beers as well. They hand-cut their French fries and incorporate pork belly into a number of dishes, including two specials I ordered – the potstickers, made by hand and fried just until hot through without drying the pork out, and the special burger with half Kauai-raised beef and half pork belly as well as bacon on top. I asked how they cured the bacon, and the owner said he used a recipe from one of Michael Ruhlman’s books, although they don’t use sodium nitrite, so the bacon is grey rather than pink and has a porkier flavor. Everything was excellent and it was about half of what we’d pay for inferior food at the hotel.

Lappert’s is a local ice cream chain with four locations on Kauai and two on other islands. Try the Kauai Pie, Kona coffee ice cream with fudge swirl, coconut flakes, and macadamia nuts. I never tried another flavor because why bother. Next to the Lappert’s in Hanapepe is a new-ish looking taco stand called Paco’s Tacos, which makes outstanding carnitas, slow-cooked but crispy on the outside, probably deep-fried once it’s done cooking but so, so good. The only disappointment was the guacamole, made fresh but lacking salt and acid for me. It’s a good one-two combo if you remember to save room for ice cream.

I had an interesting twist on poke at the Hanalei Dolphin restaurant in Hanalei, down towards Poipu, near a shop my wife wanted to visit. Two kinds of raw fish (one was ahi) and some cooked prawns were tossed in a coconut-lemongrass sauce that threatened to overpower the fish but never quite got there, served over a bed of mixed greens with some root-vegetable chips on the side (taro and purple sweet potato, I think) if you’d rather not use a fork. I only had poke three times on the trip, never at a truly local spot like a good fish market, so I can only say that this had the best overall flavor but I can’t speak to its authenticity.

My final recommendation is the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Kauai Community College, right near Lihue and next door to the Koloa Rum Company. The fresh fruit there was out of sight – large, juicy starfruits with orange flesh and a subtle sweet-citrus flavor; papayas with reddish-orange flesh that were also bursting with sugar; plus huge jackfruits, apple bananas, pineapple, and more than we could hope to try. We did buy some butterscotch roasted macadamia nuts from the Kauai Nut Roasters and jams from Monkeypod, but had to pass on the desserts offered by one vendor whose name I can’t find – she had a lilikoi (passion fruit) custard that was absolutely incredible but would have spoiled in the car since we were headed out to the Canyon.

One more note – several readers recommended a noodle shop called Hamura Saimin in downtown Lihue, but after talking to several locals, I passed. Every person I asked said the shop uses too much MSG in their broth, and that the place isn’t very clean, which is about the one non-food-related variable that I care about when deciding where to eat. I also read a few reviews that mentioned the use of a Spam knockoff in some of their soups, and I won’t touch that stuff, even if it is a local tradition. Meat doesn’t come from cans.

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→ November 6, 2012
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Umamicatessen & Intelligentsia Coffee.

The offseason buyer’s guides continue with today’s post on the outfield market and yesterday’s on middle infielders. Wednesday’s will cover starting pitchers.

Umamicatessen is the latest creation of Adam Fleischman, the man behind Umami Burger (which I reviewed in February 2010), folding a burger joint into a restaurant with a larger menu that also includes salads, starters, Jewish deli sandwiches (mostly featuring pastrami), artisan hams (including prosciuttos and two types of jamon serrano), various cooked pig dishes created by Top Chef Master Chris Cosentino, and doughnuts made to order. It’s over the top by design, and while some of the more decadent items were too rich for more than a few bites, every item we tried – I went with D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro – was outstanding.

I focused on the Pigg menu, by Cosentino, ordering pork cracklins ($5) with smoked paprika, sage, and cayenne, as well as the Texas Toast, topped with an obscene quantity of barbecued pig’s tail and a small amount of vinegary cole slaw. The cracklins, one of three lard-fried items on the menu along with crispy pig ears and French fries topped with ham and “brainaise,” were highly addictive, with the crunchy, airy texture of puffed rice but the unmistakable tangy-salty flavor of pork skin. If they had a flaw, it’s that it would be too easy to eat the entire cardboard cone full of them without realizing just how much you were eating (including the sheer quantity of fat).

The Texas Toast ($11) is an enormous plate of food, giant chunks of pig tail that looked a lot like an oversized short rib, fattier on the inside than that cut of cow, and with a slightly tough skin that needed knifework where a short rib can be eaten with a fork (teeth optional). The flavor of the sauce itself was the star item on the plate, elevating the smokiness of the tail with red pepper, cumin, brown sugar, and dark flavors that reminded me of coffee or aged whiskey. Every part of the dish worked together, but the pig’s tail itself was a fair amount of work to eat and I’m sure I left some bits of meat in the middle because I was trying to perform liposuction with a steak knife.

The roasted baby carrots ($4) were a huge bargain considering the quality of the carrots – actual baby carrots, not giant factory-farmed carrots cut and tumbled to look like baby carrots – and the care in their preparation, leaving them ready to eat right up to the half-inch of green extending from the carrot-tops, as well as the smoky red harissa sauce beneath them. The beet salad featured yellow beets (I presume roasted and peeled) with truffled ricotta, wild arugula, and smoked almonds rested primarily on the flavor of the cheese, which was thicker than most ricotta, more like a soft goat cheese, with enough tang to balance the earthy truffle flavor and the pepper notes of the arugula – but the beet was a little lost in the mix, even though overall the salad was excellent.

We ordered two donuts, the tres leches cake donut ($4) and the yeast-raised beignets (two small ones for $4), with the tres leches the clear winner for both of us. The donut itself probably stood on its own, but the combination of milks, caramel, and cinnamon-topped whipped cream turned it into the best coffee cake you’ve ever had in your life. The beignets were a little dry throughout, although the burnt sugar-coffee-chicory dipping sauce was a clever nod to New Orleans-style coffee (and, to be honest, had a lot more flavor).

The draft beer selection included about eight or nine options, running the gamut from IPAs to the Deschutes porter I chose. Nick went with the Bourbon Pig, bacon-washed bourbon with sugar and bitters, topped with a few thin slices of crispy pig’s ear. He described it as “smoky but not too strong. Basically it was wildly dangerous and amazing.”

Speaking of LA, I owe a shout-out to Intelligentsia Coffee, where I had an espresso back in September and got a little free coffee as a gift from a reader. I do love coffee but find most espressos are too harsh to drink without either milk or sugar – and sometimes both. Intelligentsia is one of the very few that uses beans fresh enough and high enough quality that I can drink the resulting espresso straight, with their Black Cat producing a beautiful, viscous shot with bright fruity notes (stop laughing) and a little oak, but none of the bitterness from older beans or much darker roasts. They started in Chicago, with four locations there and now three more in greater L.A., along with roasting operations in both places, and an emphasis on a personalized coffee experience in the store, where you get a barista with his/her own station who takes your order (and offers guidance) and makes your drink. It’s expensive relative to the big chain espresso spots, but you are paying for quality of inputs and the expertise of your barista. I’d rather pay more for that than spend 30% less on battery acid in a demi-tasse.

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→ March 30, 2012
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Citizen Public House + more Scottsdale eats.

Citizen Public House in Scottsdale was on Phoenix magazine’s list of the 23 best new restaurants of 2011; this was my seventh so far, although two of the ones I’d visited previously have since closed. This dinner was the best meal I’ve had at any Arizona restaurant other than Pizzeria Bianco, a fine dining-meets-gastropub menu that’s heavy on bacon fat and other comfort-food staples.

We started with the pork belly pastrami ($12), probably their best-known dish, a small portion of melt-in-your-mouth pork belly with an exterior bark served over browned rye spaetzle with a Brussels sprout slaw and a whole-grain mustard vinaigrette. The meat is tender, the fat smooth and warm, and the zing of the mustard helped balance the richness of the meat. It was difficult to get all of the ingredients in one bite, but the hint of sweetness in the spice rub married well with the acidity of the vinaigrette and the faint bitterness of the cabbage. The bacon-fat popcorn ($5) is as you’d imagine – freshly-popped popcorn tossed in bacon fat with crispy pieces of bacon mixed in; there was a lot of fat at the bottom of the bowl but the popcorn itself wasn’t greasy.

The seared sea scallops ($24) over creamy grits were probably a bit past medium-rare but the sear was perfect and brought out the scallops’ inherent sweetness; they’re not my favorite kind of shellfish (that would be crab), but since this is another signature dish I felt compelled to try it, and actually liked the grits – more like the softest polenta imaginable, but made with white corn grits and whole corn rather than yellow cornmeal, creamy but not overly cheesy to the point where they might overshadow the scallops. The dish was topped with more crispy bacon bits, which are always welcome, and there was a superfluous Coca-Cola gastrique around the edges of the plate. My friend got the fair-trade short rib ($28), cut flanken-style, braised and browned (my preferred style) with a dried cherry sauce (barely necessary) and served over mashed parsnips

The chocolate pecan bars were a little sweet for me, with the texture of fudge and a salted caramel sauce on top, but if you like fudgy brownies this would likely be right up your alley, and the chicory ice cream that comes with it does give an earthy component to balance out the sticky-sweet flavor and texture of the bars. The beer selection only includes one local beer on draft (Four Peaks’ hefeweizen, which isn’t even one of their top two brews); the cocktail menu is heavy on old-school ingredients like gin and rye but in more contemporary concotions.

* Scratch Pastries on Indian School supposedly has the best macarons in town, but after one look at them – wide and flat, as if they’d spread badly in the oven – I decided to stick with a sandwich, which was on some of the best bread I’ve had out here. The smoked duck breast sandwich comes with walnuts, mixed greens, and olive oil, which sounded like it might be too simple but instead keeps the duck – smoky and tender but not fatty – at center stage. The sandwich came with a side salad for $8, an absolute steal given the quality of the ingredients, making it all the more horrifying that someone might choose one of the million fast-food options in that area to save a buck or two (if that).

* Echo Coffee is between Old Town and Papago Park (where the A’s minor league complex is, as well as the Phoenix Zoo) and rivals Cartel Coffee Lab for the best drip coffee in town. Echo grinds the beans to order, sitting them in a cone filter and pouring just-boiled water over the top, so it brews as you watch. Yes, it’s a $2 cup of coffee, but this is what real coffee tastes like, full of subtle notes that are lost when the coffee is overroasted (I’m looking at you, Peet’s) or blended to eliminate any kind of character (the very definition of Starbucks’ Pike Place blend). It’s too far from the house for me to go there just for a cup of coffee, but it’s good enough that I would reroute myself to go by there if I was otherwise headed into Phoenix or Scottsdale.

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→ September 11, 2009
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Milwaukee eats, 2009.

I was on Mike and Mike this morning and apparently made Scott Feldman a left-hander. Good times. The moral of this story, since I was thinking about Feldman’s cutter as a weapon against lefties, is not to think when talking on the radio. I did 90-minute chat and believe I got everyone’s handedness right, so there’s that.

Joe Posnanski mentions me in his new column for Sports Illustrated, which means I’ll probably hear from a whole new group of people from my childhood who had no idea I was a sportswriter.

I didn’t do much new in Milwaukee from my last trip, revisiting Cempazuchi (and ordering the same stuff) and Beans & Barley (going for the whole wheat pancakes, which were very good but very wheaty). I finally visited Kopp’s for frozen custard, and it was very good, particularly the texture, which was probably an 80 on the 20-80 scale – you’re not likely to find smoother custard on the planet. Their chocolate isn’t very chocolatey, but the only place I hit last year that had a strong chocolate custard had the worst texture.

I had breakfast at Hotch-a-Do, across the street from Beans & Barley, a really funky, very local place that unfortunately only opens at 9 am. The blueberry and banana pancakes were a little rich and mildly flavored but generally good, although I’d probably give something else on the menu a shot next time around. They do serve Alterra coffee, which I tried the next day at the Alterra stand at the Milwaukee airport. I’ve largely given up drip coffee, but Matthew Leach at mlb.com swears by Alterra, and he didn’t lie – that is some Damn Fine Coffee, dark but not overroasted, with plenty of character of the bean (Nicaraguan, mildly acidic but well-rounded with good body), and brewed at the right strength.

Matthew and I also had dinner at Elsa’s on the Park after I found out that Sobelman’s was closed for dinner on Labor Day (but open in the afternoon … that makes, well, no sense). He raved about his burger, but mine was cooked enough to serve as a coaster despite the fact that I ordered it medium. They also lose points for having no beer on tap and almost nothing local, but I did enjoy a Chicago beer, Goose Island Matilda, a “strong Belgian pale ale” that was a rich amber with great body and a pronounced note of good-quality honey.

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→ September 5, 2009
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Philadelphia eats.

Before I get to Philly, a few of you have asked about the restaurant where my cousin is the pastry chef. It’s called City Limits Diner, and there are two locations, one on the edge of White Plains near Yonkers, the other in Stamford, Connecticut. My cousin is the pastry chef and her husband is the executive chef. I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t genuinely like the food. If you do go, make sure you have dessert, and tell your server that Tracy’s cousin Keith sent you (not that it will get you anything, but it’ll score me some points).

I ate all of my non-ballpark meals in Philly at Reading Terminal Market, an eating paradise on Filbert between 11th and 12th streets, right across from the Market East train station. I could have stayed a week and still had places there I wanted to try.

For breakfast, I hit the Dutch Eating Place – Dutch as in Pennsylvania Dutch, a community responsible for at least ten of the stands around the market. They’re best known for their blueberry pancakes, which were solid average or a bit above, and for their cured meats, which were a mixed bag – the pork sausage was meaty and peppery and the portion was beyond generous, but the turkey bacon was gamey and greasy. I also tried their “apple” french toast, which as far as I can tell, was just some whole or multi-grain sandwich bread, dipped in egg batter, fried, and topped with too much cheap cinnamon, with no evidence whatsoever of apples. The pancakes were worth a trip, though. Cash only, cost $10 including tea and tip both days.

DiNic’s serves hot Italian sandwiches in just a few varieties, but everyone recommended the roast pork, thinly sliced, served on fresh crusty Italian bread, with just a few possible toppings – sharp provolone, roasted peppers (sweet or hot), broccoli rabe, or spinach. I went with the rabe and sweet peppers. The sandwich was about a foot long, so I barely got halfway through it, and the inside of the bread was soaked with the juice of the pork (that’s a good thing). For about $8 it’s a bargain and was the best thing I ate on the trip.

Delilah’s Soul Food had some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. Even though the chicken was more warm than hot when I got it, the crust was still crispy, not greasy, and was well seasoned with salt and pepper without having too much of either. For $8.50 or so you get chicken, cornbread (the sweet kind, unfortunately), and one side; I chose collard greens and got a big bowl that I got maybe halfway through and then poured the juice at the bottom over the cornbread. It’s one of the few places in RTM with table service.

The Famous Fourth Street Cookie Company had a long line around lunch time on my first trip there; the cookies are constantly coming out of the oven, so you can get something hot at that hour, although I found that at room temperature a few hours later, they were just average cookies. They’re a good four inches or so in diameter and cost about $2 apiece. The “double chocolate chip” is just a chocolate chip cookie with a lot of chips, and the chocolate chip with pecans didn’t skimp on the nuts.

I grabbed a pumpkin muffin from Le Bus Bakery for the flight home; it was a bit greasy, staining the paper bag, but it didn’t have the usual pumpkin muffin flavor of stale pumpkin pie spice mix, and it wasn’t overly sweet. There was a faint spicy note, almost like cardamom, but otherwise the pumpkin was allowed to take its place at the center of the muffin.

Leaving RTM, La Colombe is a small cafe best known for its coffee-roasting operation, as they apparently supply many of the best restaurants in town. I found their espresso to be far too watery with no body, but it did have a defined flavor, with strong notes of cocoa beans and a pleasant acidity. My guess is that the beans were from Africa, although I’m no expert on varietals since I always use blends to make espresso at home.

I learned about Capogiro Gelato a few years ago on the short-lived Food Network show, The Hungry Detective, a good concept dressed up with a few too many gimmicks but with plenty of emphasis on the actual food. They have at least one more location now, at 13th and Walnut, very close to my hotel and the RTM. The gelato is very expensive – a medium, roughly 3/4 cup of gelato, cost $6.15 with tax – but outstanding quality. I got three flavors, figuring that was almost an obligation to my readers: dark chocolate, coconut, and toasted almond. The almond was a waste, as the gelato itself had almost no flavor; it comes with toasted slivered almonds, but the flavor needs to be in the gelato, not on it. The coconut was ultra-smooth with a strong, clean coconut flavor. The dark chocolate stole the show, probably the darkest, richest chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had, with a thick consistency more like cocoa pudding ice cream than a typical chocolate gelato; a medium cup of that might be overkill, but I’m willing to risk it.

I didn’t eat at any concessions at CBP, but it’s worth mentioning that the press box food was, by press box food standards, impressive. The worst part of eating while traveling is how hard it is to eat fruits and vegetables while sticking to quick, inexpensive places, and the CBP press box had cups of fresh fruit, a basic salad mix that wasn’t brown or wilted or dried out, and a few vegetable side dishes each night. I know this isn’t of much use to the majority of you, but I wanted to give credit to the Phillies for doing a nice job.

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→ April 3, 2009
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Phoenix eats, 2009.

Before I get to the food, the BBC’s site had a somewhat scary article about a link between hot beverages and esophogeal cancer. Consuming beverages over 160 F – which would include black tea and drip coffee – was associated with higher incidence of that very nasty type of cancer. On the bright side, green tea should be brewed at 160, so it’ll be served around 150-155, and the milk in espresso-based drinks should only be heated to 160, meaning that it’s also consumed below that mark. Of course, almost any coffee place that serves green tea will serve it around 200 degrees, including Charbucks, so do what I do and ask the barista to throw an ice cube or two in there.

On to Phoenix eats.Havana Café is a local mini-chain of three restaurants, one on Bell near 64th in northern Phoenix. The food is Caribbean rather than just Cuban, with a lot of Puerto Rican dishes and, most importantly, maduros up the wazoo. The ingredients are clearly very high quality and the food aims for a somewhat “cleaner” look than typical Cuban joints. The pollo Cubano, a half chicken breast marinated in a lime-orange mojo and pan-seared, was bright and tangy, while the pollo ajillo had hints of garlic but probably wouldn’t give your neighborhood vampire more than a brief scare. Just about all entrees come with white rice, most come with black beans, and I think all come with maduros, which were spectacular. They also have a huge selection of tapas featuring foods from the same Caribbean islands as well as a few from Spain; their mofongo is good, as are the masas de puerco, but their tostones were coasters and their alcapurrías were very greasy. I recommend it for lunch, but not for dinner, when they charge fine-dining prices for what is more or less peasant food. It’s a solid 50.

A reader (sorry, I’m too lazy to see which of you it was) suggested the Cornish Pasty Company over by Arizona State, and it’s now a major Klaw recommendation. The concept is great – it’s a tiny place in a strip mall, dark and narrow … like the mines in which the Cornish men who ate the pasties their wives made would work. A Cornish pasty is a type of pocket pie, a flaky pie crust wrapped around a filling that usually contains meat and root vegetables. The Cornish pasty company offers a few dozen pasty varieties, but I went with the “Oggie,” with the classic Cornish pasty filling of beef, onions, and potatoes. The filling was rich and thick and peppery, and the meat was soft enough and cubed well enough that it didn’t require a knife, and the crust was flaky and buttery and perfectly browned. The pasty itself cost $6.50 (I think it’s the cheapest one on the menu) and I barely got past half of it. On a sample of two meals – plus a bit of a caramel apple dessert pasty – I’m giving it a 60.

Another reader suggestion, Los Olivos, was less successful. It’s somewhere between really authentic Mexican food and chain Tex-Mex food; the portions were generous but everything was overdone – oversalted, overflavored, and oversauced. My wife, usually less critical than I am, said that her food wasn’t bad so much as “a mess.”

One of our favorites from last year, Blu Burger, is still going and still serving amazing Wagyu (American Kobe) burgers, but their location in Scottsdale near Kierland closed on March 7th. They still have three other locations and are opening two more soon (according to our server) in Peoria and Chandler. We did hit the one in north Scottsdale twice, and everything was the same except for the fact that while they still offer sautéed mushrooms as a topping for $1 extra, they no longer offer raw mushrooms as a topping. When I pointed out the absurdity of this, the server told me that they cook all the mushrooms they get.

The Phoenix Ranch Market near Phoenix airport has a full-service restaurant, Tradiciones, that offers mostly different fare from the quick-service options available inside the market. (Speaking of which, the quick-service food is still excellent, but they seem to be slacking on trimming the carnitas before cooking; the last two times I went there I ended up having to remove large chunks of pork fat from my mouth. Pork fat is good for cooking, not so much for eating.) The best thing going at Tradiciones is the tortilla chips served before the meal – just made, not in the least greasy, and salted. The food itself was just average; I tried the pollo asado, which seems to be a signature dish of the restaurant and the market, and it was … roast chicken. Good roast chicken, but really, it was just roast chicken. The absence of carnitas or chili verde (the latter only in a burrito, I believe) on the menu was a disappointment. The food is better inside the market and much cheaper. Grade 50.

Brian from Laveen has been pushing Joe’s BBQ for years, and I finally had a reason to go out that far to try it. It was solid-average. The Q had good flavor – I went with pulled pork and brisket – but was kind of dry, which is odd since the place was busy. I often find dry Q is the result of low turnover, since Q is something you have to make in advance and try to keep warm until it’s ordered. BBQ beans were good, a little sweet but not too much so, and the corn was, well, corn. The homemade root beer is good but strong, almost spicy. It’s a fringe 50 for me.

Raul and Theresa’s in Goodyear is a little tough to find – you have to go past the stadium, behind the airport, and you might drive right past it as I did – but worth the trip. It’s straight-up Mexican food with the usual suspects on the menu, but the food is incredibly fresh. The guacamole was an easy 65 on the scale, maybe a 70, bright green, chunky, and tasting primarily of avocadoes, not of all the junk that usually gets layered into it. The rice that’s served with every dish was fresh, not too salty, with a good tooth. My entrée was chicken enchiladas with red sauce, obviously made to order, and probably about 10% more food than I really needed to eat. Again, the actual flavor of the chicken came through, enhanced by the red sauce, not drowned by it. Overall grade 60.

Butterfield’s was our one breakfast out, and it’s a zoo on Sundays, not helped by a server with two personalities (alternating between friendly and why-the-hell-are-you-bothering-me) and no ability to estimate wait times (he was off by 100%, and not in the good way). The food was mostly good – I had a waffle that was light with good crust and an almost cakelike flavor, and I tasted the pancakes, which were not heavy and had that same flavor, which I’m thinking was vanilla combined with butter. The chicken apple maple sausage wasn’t dry but also didn’t have much flavor beyond apple. My wife loved her whole wheat brioche French toast. The restaurant is a solid 50, but plays up because of the big menu.

Goldbar Espresso in Tempe seems to get rave reviews, and they talk a good game about the freshness of their coffee, but the espresso there is atrocious – they pull the most diluted shots I think I’ve ever had, with maybe twice the water that they should be using, so the result is something like what you’d get if you tried to make espresso using Maxwell House grounds. I sort of knew I was in trouble when I walked in and looked at the menu board and saw a caffe mocha as the first item; if a coffee place really prides itself on its coffee, shouldn’t espresso be the top listing? And they use Hershey’s syrup in their mochas, too. Hershey’s is to chocolate what McDonald’s is to beef and what Bud Light is to beer. Anyway, my wife went to Starbucks and I went a month without coffee.

I’ve mentioned Gelato Spot before, but having stopped there at least a half-dozen times last month I’m upping my grade to a 55. I had found in the past that they kept the gelato too cold, but they’ve fixed the problem, and their chocolate seems darker than it was in the past. The coconut gelato is still a favorite. I did try the chocolate caramel brownie flavor, but it was too sweet, and there’s something about their caramel that I don’t like, a sourness that shows up in the caramel gelato too.

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→ September 30, 2008
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Milwaukee eats (+ TV, radio).

TV today: ESPNEWS, 4:10-4:30 EDT as part of the Insider segment with Jerry Crasnick.
Radio: Northsound 1380 AM, Everett, Washington, with the Fish, 5:30 pm PDT. Also, ESPN 540 Milwaukee, Wednesday, 11:15 am CDT (streaming available online).

I have to say that I underestimated Milwaukee, figuring I was headed into a culinary wasteland filled with fat people who eat brats and drink pale beer all the time. It was actually one of the best eating towns I’ve been to all year, especially in the very funky area between Brady Street and North Street west of Prospect, which is definitely where I’d live if I moved there and could stand winters cold enough to turn your testicles necrotic.

First meal might have been the best – lunch at Cempazuchi on Brady Street. It’s sort of an upscale twist on Mexican food, with a heavy dose of authentic Mexican dishes mixed in. I started with the sopa de lima, a clear soup with chicken, lime juice, and tortilla strips, and then ordered the pork “torta,” Cempazuchi’s term for an unusual sandwich on pan frances with avocado, jalapeño, and onions. Both were phenomenal. The soup had just the right balance of acid, salt, and a touch of heat, and had obviously been assembled seconds before it reached the table. The sandwich was filled with pulled pork, apparently smoked properly since it wasn’t dry and didn’t require a sauce, and came on soft bread that had been sliced and grilled. The sandwich also came with a half-hearted garden salad with sliced radishes and an indeterminate white dressing. The meal starts with two salsas, one that was “peanut-based” that had an odd texture (shocking), and another with roasted tomatoes and garlic that was too thin but had a great smoky flavor.

Saturday’s breakfast was at Beans & Barley, a combination café and natural foods store just off North Street. There was no pork on the menu, so my EMPT included chicken sausage, which was cooked to death and mostly inedible. Everything else was excellent, particularly the breakfast potatoes, new red potatoes sliced and roasted with rosemary. The café serves Rishi teas (rhymes with “chichi”), but their only black tea is Earl Grey. It comes in a big ceramic pot with a strainer inside filled with loose tea, but it was already dark and bitter the moment it reached the table, meaning that it had been brewing too long. The properly-made scrambled eggs and the amazing potatoes still make it worth a trip.

I hit up a reader suggestion for Saturday dinner, Pizza Man, across the street from Beans & Barley. That’s where I had my lone beer of the trip, an ale from New Glarus with a fruity taste and medium body; I prefer darker beers, so this probably wasn’t the best choice, but it was their only local beer on tap. For dinner, the pizzas looked like they had the proper crust but were overtopped, so I went with one of the recommended specials, wild boar ravioli in a marsala sauce. The ravioli were excellent; I’ve never had boar before, but the flavor of the ravioli was very much like bacon. The sauce, on the other hand, was bitter with a pretty clear note of alcohol, meaning that it wasn’t cooked enough. The dish came with this amazing light garlic bread, not greasy at all and perfect for absorbing sauce, if you wanted the sauce absorbed. Pizza Man also has a huge wine list, and the décor – Old World Dungeon – reminded me of a place my wife and I visited in Siena almost ten years ago, an upscale “medieval” place called Il Gallo Nero.

Milwaukee being the center of the frozen custard world, I had to make sure to hit a few spots while I was on the ground. (Frozen custard is a style of ice cream that relies on egg yolks for texture, as opposed to “Philadelphia” ice cream, which contains no eggs and uses more butterfat.) Of the three places I tried, Gilles, Leon’s, and Oscar’s, Gilles wins the overall prize for the best combination of flavor and texture. All three places had very smooth custards, and Leon’s probably was the smoothest of all but both the chocolate and vanilla were timid, particularly the chocolate. At Gilles, I went with the flavor of the day, “turtle,” which had caramel and pecans mixed in and maybe a tiny bit of fudge. The vanilla flavor still came through in the custard, and the texture was just a shade below Leon’s. Oscar’s “mud pie” – allegedly mocha custard with hot fudge and Oreo knockoff cookies – had the worst texture, just slightly icy, and the knockoff cookies weren’t very good, but the custard did have a strong chocolate flavor.

I also approve of the Milwaukee Public Market, which is a fairly small building that houses maybe a dozen merchants, from a produce stand to a real fishmonger to a spice house to a few stands selling prepared foods. If I lived in Milwaukee, I’d be there all the time. The coffee-shop in the Market, the Cedarburg Coffee Roaster, roasts at least some of its coffees right there at the stand, which was a positive sign for their espresso. A double espresso macchiato (they don’t sell singles) runs $2.75, and while the beans were obviously fresh, the espresso was underextracted, resulting in a powerfully sour shot; the most likely explanation is that the barista used more grounds than necessary for the pull. It was a waste of what I think was pretty good coffee.

I also went to The Soup & Stock Market and ordered a bowl of their chicken and dumpling soup, which included real hand-made dumplings (obviously pinched out of dough by an actual hand) and was based on their own homemade stock (available frozen for purchase if you don’t want to make your own stock at home). The soup was very good, if just a little underflavored, filled with dumplings and chicken and vegetables; the stock was a bit on the light side, but it had the great mouth-feel you only get from soup made with stock. The soup also came with a hunk of a pretty amazing dense white bread. I also bought a bottle of Haley and Annabelle’s Vanilla Root Beer, brewed by two girls aged 10 and 5, with proceeds going to their college education fund. It was at least solid-average, better than any national brand, with a dark color, deep root beer flavor, but probably a little more sugar than I’d like. It’s behind, say, Thomas Kemper’s (my gold standard), but I admit I was sucked in by the story and the cause.

The one dud meal was breakfast at Miss Katie’s Diner, an old-school greasy-spoon near Marquette’s campus. Absolutely everything was drenched in butter, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The hash browns were soggy from frying in so much grease, the toast was buttered so heavily that I could see through it, and the eggs ended up sitting in the grease that was on the plate. There were definitely better options out there for Sunday breakfast.

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→ August 30, 2008
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Espresso.

My cousin from Italy came to visit this week – her first time in the U.S.; we’d met her nine years ago in Italy – and paid me the ultimate compliment by saying she liked my espresso … and that it was the first decent espresso she’d had in the U.S. I’m no expert on coffee or espresso, but I’ve got a system that seems to work for me.

I’ve said in the past that you need a burr grinder to properly grind coffee. Blade grinders smash the beans in an uneven fashion, and generate more heat the longer you grind, so to get coffee ground finely and evenly enough to use in an espresso machine, you’d have to grind the beans so long that they’d continue roasting and could even smoke, and you probably still couldn’t get the grind fine enough. If you can’t afford a good burr grinder, buy your coffee ground for an espresso machine, and buy it in the tiniest quantities possible.

I use a Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder, which, at $90, is the cheapest “true” burr grinder available. (I had a lower-end Capresso burr grinder before that one, but it couldn’t go fine enough for espresso.) The Infinity works for French pressed coffee, drip coffee, and espresso, and claims to be able to go fine enough for Turkish coffee, although I’ve never tried that. On the downside, it creates some coffee dust that spurts out when you remove the plastic receptacle where the machine deposits the ground coffee, and you’ll have to give the machine a good whack to get all of your grounds to fall. There are, of course, many more expensive grinders you can buy, from Saeco, Rancilio, DeLonghi, and other brands.

For the espresso machine itself, again, I own what I think is the cheapest legitimate model available here, the Gaggia Carezza. The Carezza makes a great shot of espresso. It steams/froths milk well, but I’ve found it takes two boiler cycles to steam enough for cappuccino or a caffe latte, so the lower machine cost means some extra time investment when you’re making drinks. The Carezza is still available, but Gaggia has introduced a slightly smaller and cheaper machine, the Evolution.

I also bought a heavier tamper than the cheap plastic thing that came with the Carezza, and I use a $5 instant-read thermometer when steaming milk. That’s about it for the specialized hardware. Have a double shot glass capable of holding 2.5 ounces of liquid ready to receive the espresso out of the machine, and get your cup(s) ready for the actual espresso drink(s). I do not recommend that you use the plastic splitter that allows you to divide the espresso coming out of the machine into two cups; it’s a crema-killer.

For coffee, the most important variable is not roast, but date: Coffee begins to go stale as soon as it’s done roasting. If you can buy beans where they’re roasted on the day on which they’re roasted, you’ll get better espresso, with more crema and a fuller body. Beans sold at Starbucks were roasted three weeks before the day you buy them. For making espresso, they suck. I buy my beans at Whole Foods, where they put the roast date on the outside of the bin; if I’m lucky, I’ll get beans that are still warm. I store them in airtight mason jars, loosening the lids once a day to let out the excess carbon dioxide.

To actually make the drink:
1. Turn on the espresso machine about ten minutes before you intend to make coffee. Make sure that the water reservoir has plenty of water in it, and that the portafilter is in place but (of course) has no coffee grounds in it. This allows the metal part of the portafilter to heat up before you put coffee in it.
2. The Carezza has three buttons: a power switch, an espresso on/off switch, and a steamer on/off switch. Unless the steamer switch is on, the machine assumes you’re making espresso, and a green light is illuminated when the machine’s boiler is hot enough to do so. (If you have a different machine, these steps may vary slightly.) When the green light is on, flip the espresso switch to “on” and open the steamer valve by turning the knob on top of the machine that controls steam pressure. I use my metal steamer pitcher to catch the hot water coming out of the valve, and I pour this into the shot glass and into the demi-tasse cups to warm them up.
3. When the boiler recovers, pull a blank shot – that is, pull a shot without any coffee grounds. This is a good time to turn on the coffee grinder and get the beans ready; I find that two scoops of beans yields enough for about 15-16 grams of grounds, which is the right amount for two shots of espresso. I’ve found it’s far, far better to use a little too much coffee than a little too little; in fact, going to 18-20 grams will almost ensure a good but imperfect pull. Always pull two shots at once.
4. Remove your portafilter from the machine, dump out any remaining water and rinse quickly with hot water if necessary. Add the ground coffee and press it down with your tamper, using about 30 pounds of pressure. I know what the right amount of pressure is now because I’ve done it for a while, but if you’re just starting out, try using a bathroom scale and pressing down on it with your tamper. Tap out any loose grounds and put the portafilter back on to your machine.
5. Put your shot glass under the portafilter. Wait until the boiler is ready and then turn the espresso switch on. You should get about 2-2.5 ounces of espresso in 25-35 seconds of brewing; I usually stop at 2 ounces, around 25 seconds when I’ve done everything right. The espresso stream becomes noticeably thinner beyond that point.
6. Wait 20-30 seconds and remove the portafilter. (If you don’t wait, the machine will “burp” and you’ll get wet coffee grounds everywhere, including up in the machine where you don’t want them.) If you’re just making espresso, you’re just about done – run a blank shot to clean the machine and that’s all.
7. To add steamed or frothed milk, turn the second switch to “on” and wait for the boiler to heat up. I leave the two shots of espresso in the shot glass to keep the liquid as warm as possible. Steaming is simple: With a thermometer in your milk, raise the pitcher until the tip of the steamer wand is touching the top of the milk. Froth until the milk’s temperature reaches 100 degrees, then plunge the wand into the milk until the thermometer reaches 160 degrees. The goal is pourable froth, and if you froth it too long the froth will become dry and spoonable rather than pourable. I’ve found this is easier to do with the steam valve most of the way open – trying to finesse it with a low level of steam produced coarser bubbles for me.
8. Turn the steamer switch off and run a blank shot of espresso. If you left the portafilter in place during steaming, wait several minutes for the pressure to dissipate before running the blank.

I think that’s it, although I may have missed a step or a detail. The product links above go to amazon.com; you can also find them at Whole Latte Love, where you’ll find buyer guides and more product information. For some coffee-making tutorials and a very active message board on coffee, check out coffeegeek.com.

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→ July 2, 2008
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The Next Food Network Star, week 5.

Notes on episode 5:

  • The first challenge was even more inane than usual. Asking a cook to describe someone else’s dish and then docking them for not guessing all the ingredients correctly is more than a little absurd. At the end, the judges criticized a few contestants for not “owning” the dishes, or “taking ownership.” Hey, news flash, they didn’t cook the dishes they were describing. I have more ownership of the Taj Mahal than they had of those dishes.
  • Cat Cora is a verbal train wreck – “your describing skills,” “the reason I’ve chose you” – and I’ve seen shorter roots on a hundred-year-old tree. Having her judge the candidates on presentation was not a good decision. Seriously, when Aaron said “coq de vin,” I’m sure she thought, “Yeah, that’s right.”
  • Adam’s decision-making sucked; bone-in chicken breasts can be cooked in 45 minutes in an oven, but not on a grill, and polenta takes a solid 45 just to cook, plus a few minutes to finish it.
  • The key to the second challenge was deconstruction. For the coq au vin, I would have done roasted chicken breasts wrapped in some form of cured pork (probably bacon or pancetta) with a sauce of red wine, butter, shallots, and thyme. Lisa’s idea of duck confit for the turducken was great, as was using a poultry sausage, although I would have used the sausage gambit to get credit for chicken, which has the least flavor of the three meats involved.
  • “I can’t believe that happened” … no, Jen, I can’t believe YOU did that. Who the hell bangs a glass jar on a cooktop – or ANYWHERE – to get it open? You have heat sources everywhere. Run the lid under hot water for ten seconds. It’s not that hard. If she bangs glass jars all the time, I’m surprised she has any blood left in her system.
  • The complaint about the white onions and beige pastry was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I cancelled my Bon Appetit subscription four or five years ago because their recipes were slipping, and this is probably why: They care more about colors clashing on the plate than, you know, how the freaking food tastes. Unbelievable. I’m not sure what world they live in; maybe a world where Andrew’s hair is actually stylish.
  • Shane and Kelsey won this in a walk; I have to give Shane credit for coming off as older than nineteen every time he’s on camera. Still not sure I could stand 22 minutes of Kelsey.
  • The judge who made the point (to Aaron, I believe) about self-editing was spot on: You can’t do that while you’re on camera. It’s not writing, where you can go back, delete, re-word, and so on. You have to just keep going, even if what you just said was wrong or stupid or boxed you into a corner. Fight your way out if you have to, but don’t stop or pause or think about what you just said. The camera is still rolling while you think.

Unrelated link: Starbucks to close 600 stores. I wonder if this location is one of them.

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