→ March 16, 2023
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Charlotte & Columbia eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 5, 2023
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Minneapolis eats, 2023 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ February 21, 2023
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Dallas eats, 2023 edition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ May 16, 2022
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Arkansas eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 26, 2022
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This is Your Mind on Plants.

Michael Pollan made a name for himself, or perhaps a bigger name, for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which came off like such an attack on our modern diets that he wrote a brief companion book called In Defense of Food. In defense of Pollan, however, his writing goes well beyond those two books or that subject; he can be a gifted writer on many matters of food and food science, and is not the scold that Omnivore’s Dilemma might lead you to believe that he is. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a history of food and food science, and an explanation of how we used fire and heat to change the way we ate, in turn changing the trajectory of our species. His most recent book, a collection of two previously published essays plus a third, is called This is Your Mind on Plants, and covers three psychoactive compounds or chemicals produced by the plant world: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

By far, my favorite part of this book was the portion on caffeine, which was originally released as an Audible original and excerpted by The Guardian as part of its longread series a few months ago. Pollan was a caffeine addict, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, and as part of his research into the chemical’s effects on our brains and our lives, chose to give it up completely before gradually reintroducing it into his life. He spoke to Dr. Matthew Walker, author of How We Sleep, who is a scold, at least on this topic, and among other things claims that caffeine’s half-life is around 6 hours, so a quarter of the caffeine you consumed in a cup of joe at 9 am is still in your system at 9 pm. (Estimates of its actual half-life vary, but it may be closer to 5 hours, which would push up that latter time to 7 pm.) Caffeine in the afternoon, which we often consume to combat our bodies’ evolved tendency towards biphasic sleep, is especially harmful; the iced coffee you have at 2 pm would still leave more than a quarter of its caffeine in your system at 11 pm, a typical bedtime for adults who have kids or at least have to work in the morning.

Most people understand on some level that caffeine can harm your sleep quantity and quality, but Pollan also points out how much we depend on caffeine each day for simple alertness, to feel like we think clearly, to clear the fog of sleep – or, of course, the fog of caffeine withdrawal. There is even research showing that caffeine can help certain types of recall and improve our reaction times in certain physical tasks, although viewers of Good Eats know that caffeine may make you work faster, but it doesn’t make you work smarter. Pollan gives a breezy history of caffeine and its two major delivery systems (tea and coffee), including descriptions of their ties to colonialism, exploitation of native peoples, and slavery, before bringing us back to the narrative of his caffeine withdrawal and reintroduction.

The opium essay appeared in slightly redacted form in Harper’s in the late 1990s, and is less about what the drugs derived from opium do than Pollan’s own misadventures in growing poppies in his own garden, only to discover that he may be violating federal law by doing so. Opium is a latex taken from the seed capsules of the Papaver somniferum plant, although Pollan claims that there are other poppies that can produce some of the same compounds, just in smaller quantities. The drugs we associate with poppies are opiates, alkaloids found within the latex, including morphine and codeine; or derivative products, such as heroin (made through acetylation of morphine) or oxycodone (synthesized from thebaine in the latex). You can consume the raw latex, which is supposed to be unspeakably bitter, and will cause nervous system depression. Pollan didn’t end up doing that, although he certainly thought about it, and wrote about thinking about it, and expunged a few pages until releasing the full article here. He describes the conversations from the time around what it was safe to write, while his editor at the time, John R. MacArthur, has disputed Pollan’s version of events. Anyway, Pollan drank some opium tea, and said it tasted awful but felt nice.

Then there’s mescaline, which, of these three drugs, has the unusual characteristic of offering very little downside to the user. Its use is highly restricted, because Drugs Are Bad! even though there’s a small body of evidence that mescaline, derived from a cactus that grows in the American southwest, and psilocybin, produced by several hundred species of fungi mostly in the Psilocybe genus, may help people with severe depression or anxiety. The majority of Pollan’s essay here revolves around mescaline’s somewhat recent history of use in religious ceremonies among certain indigenous American tribes, the ridiculous laws around its use, and environmental and cultural concerns around it. He eventually tries some as well, and has what sounds like a very pleasant experience of heightened awareness with mild hallucinations, not something that might fit the stereotype of a trip. I have never tried either of these psychotropics, and Pollan’s narrative made me slightly more curious about them.

Pollan the anti-scold is an insightful, conversational writer who is unafraid to educate his readers but never loses sight of the need to entertain at the same time. There might be a bit too much of him in the opium section – the idea of DEA agents bashing down his door because he had two poppies in his garden might come across as paranoid – but despite his first-person writing in the remaining two sections, he takes care not to let his persona take over. His thoughtfulness in describing the mescaline ceremony he witnesses, for example, does him credit; he’s just trying to get high, so to speak, not to appropriate anyone’s culture. It’s a short book, compiling some pieces you may have read before, but an enjoyable diversion, and one more tiny brick in the wall for drug decriminalization.

Next up: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, because Mike Schur told me to read it.

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→ November 24, 2021
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Puerto Rico eats.

I had a lot of mediocre food in Puerto Rico this time around, which was disappointing, as I would have generally said I like that cuisine, but did manage to sneak in a couple of good meals before we headed home on Sunday night. Most of the good eats are in San Juan proper, in the Viejo San Juan, Santurce, and Miramar neighborhoods in particular, while we stayed at a hotel near the airport for the conference my wife was attending, so that limited our options a bit.

Jungle Bird was by far the best place I ate on the trip, which is funny because it’s more of a kitschy tiki bar than restaurant. Their “crack eggplant” lives up to the name, though – the eggplant is dried and I assume quickly pan-fried, then doused in a mildly spicy sambal sauce with slivered almonds. It is addictive, and messy, and I think it’s the best eggplant dish I’ve ever had. Usually the texture of aubergines throws me off, and the seeds can be rather bitter if it’s not cooked correctly, but this dish had none of those issues; whatever they’re doing to the berry, it gives it a toothy, chewy texture closer to that of grilled meats. The coconut and corn fritters with queso fresco (pictured here) were sweet, balanced by the spicy and slightly tangy sauce and the salt from the cheese. The kimchi fried rice was a giant plate of exactly what it sounds like, with the kimchi well-integrated into the dish, so that it was present but not overpowering, boosted by a generous helping of peanuts and some fried chicken thighs (an add-on). That was actually the spiciest of the three dishes we tried. Everything was fantastic, although I actually thought the cocktails were on the weaker side for tiki drinks, which tend to hide a lot of rum – especially the Zombie, which contains some 151-proof rum – behind fruit juices.

I didn’t expect to find Neapolitan-style pizza in San Juan, but I stumbled on Verace while walking around the Isla Verde area outside our hotel. It’s located in a boutique hotel just off the main drag, but caught my eye for the actual wood-fired pizza oven on its patio. I ordered the prosciutto and arugula pizza, which had some other name, and got exactly what I expected: fresh mozzarella, prosciutto di Parma, and a modest serving of arugula on top, with crushed tomatoes rather than sauce (and certainly not sweetened like so many sauces). Everything on top of the pizza was superb. The one knock I have on Verace is that they didn’t cook their pizzas at anywhere near 800 degrees – the patio oven wasn’t even lit, so I’m not sure how they were cooking the pizzas that day – so there was no charring on the outside or underneath, and the outer crust didn’t have any crispness. The flavors were great, including that of the dough itself, and they were using good-quality ingredients for the toppings. I am just a little skeptical about the veracity of their claims to be Neapolitan-style.

Breakfast options were scant, but if you’re on Isla Verde, at the eastern end of that main road with all the hotels is a bakery called Las Canarias that does a credible job with fresh breakfast sandwiches, made to order, along with pancakes and waffles – the closest I saw to an “American” breakfast outside of hotel restaurants. (I’m aware Puerto Rico is American, too.) I had an egg and bacon sandwich on a crusty baguette, less airy than French bread but crunchy and sturdy enough for the fillings, which were a little saltier than I’d like – but I’ll take that over undersalted eggs. It was more than I could finish, too.

A friend introduced me to Gustos Coffee on my last trip to Puerto Rico, and I was dying to get back there both to drink their coffee and buy some local beans to bring home; Puerto Rico has a small coffee-growing industry, but the beans generally don’t leave the island. Gustos has a large, gorgeous new café in the Miramar neighborhood of San Juan, offering a full array of coffee drinks and beans of varying roasts as well as some breakfast and lunch items. They do offer pour-overs, which the day I was there was made with a blend that included Puerto Rican and Central American beans. I might just take drip coffee if I went again, as they use the same beans in that, and in the espresso drinks as well. They had several options for locally grown beans for sale, roasted either medium or dark (they don’t do light roasts – my recollection is that they felt it wouldn’t sell), picking the ones grown at the highest altitudes. I’ll update this post when I try them.

If you can’t make it to any of their locations – they also have one at the airport that is open quite late – there’s a tiny coffee stand inside the Verdanza hotel, right by Verace, called Espresso Lab that is more than adequate. They know how to pull a shot correctly, and that’s all they do – they don’t offer drip coffee, just an Americano if that’s your speed – although their milk game isn’t as strong.

The airport also has one of Metropol’s eight locations on the island (there’s a ninth in Miami), and you’re not going to do much better with airport food. It’s mostly Puerto Rican food with some Cuban dishes included, and their specialty, a stuffed Cornish game hen with maduros (fried sweet plantains), was actually great, even for something that was obviously not made to order, given how fast we were served. The menu has a lot of options, although it is heavily weighted towards meat eaters. They offer the Cuban rice dish arroz congri (black beans and rice, cooked together) and the Puerto Rican arroz mamposteao (rice with stewed red beans) as side options, or as individual small plates, and I’d be happy with a big bowl of either of those.

We had a full afternoon before the flight back to Philly, so we took a day trip to Charco Frio, a series of small waterfalls in the same rainforest as the famed El Yunque (which required more time than we had). It’s a lengthy hike, 15-20 minutes, along a muddy trail, so I recommend bringing water shoes if you go there. On the way back, we visited Luquillo, a gorgeous beach on a small peninsula the north shore that faces west, so the water is calmer than it is at the hotel beaches in Isla Verde and San Juan. Towards the southern end of the beach is a long series of food stalls offering all manner of food – mostly Puerto Rican foods like alcapurrias (corn meal stuffed with meats or fish or cheese), bacalaitos (breaded and fried dried salt cod), and surullitos (fried corn and cheese sticks), all of which we tried. It’s all greasy and mostly good and I think best served with a cold beer. And a lot of napkins.

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→ May 22, 2021
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Nashville eats, 2021 edition.

 I went to Nashville to see Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, but only saw the former as the latter was scratched with little explanation. I did eat extremely well for just spending one night and getting four meals in that enclave of sanity, however.

Folk is a new artisanal pizzeria and Italian restaurant from the folks behind Rolf & Daughters, a pasta-focused restaurant that might be my single favorite dinner spot in the city. Folk’s pizza is Neapolitan-adjacent – high heat, blistered crust, but not with the wet centers or very puffy edges of true Neapolitan pizzas. The menu does have many other things on it, including vegetable dishes and some proteins, but I just went for the pizza. I had the margherita, which was good if a bit salty, a grade 55 pizza, with the quality of the toppings very evident; and a starter of Cantabrian anchovies with lemon, mint, and olive oil, which was fine but which I didn’t think benefited from the mint. The best thing I had at Folk was actually a cocktail: the Everyday People, with gin, Amaro Montenegro, dry vermouth, and Maraschino liqueur. That and the pizza would have been perfect.

I had dinner before the Friday game at the Hattie B’s location right near Vandy’s campus. I’d never had Nashville hot chicken before this, because while I like some spicy foods, I don’t like any food that is so spicy I can’t taste anything else, and too much chile pepper has never really agreed with me. I felt like this was something I had to at least try once, especially given the number of times in Nashville and the fact that my hotel was, quite literally, across the street. I got the medium – they have no spice, mild, medium, and I think three levels of insanity beyond that – and it was exactly right for me. More and I would not have enjoyed the experience on any level; less and I would have regretted wimping out. This is excellent fried chicken, perfectly crispy outside with the cayenne in the coating, still juicy inside, and with more than just pure heat for flavor. I got collard greens, because I always get collard greens; and the potato salad, because I figured that would be an appropriate counter to the heat. The collards were great, but I also really just love slow-cooked collard greens, and the potatoes served their purpose. This is about the chicken, though. And yeah, I know Prince’s is probably the original, but it wasn’t right across the street from my hotel.

I had lunch before the Saturday game from Thai Esane, which Eater tabbed as one of the best restaurants in Nashville right now, but I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I got pad see ew, since I wanted something I could reasonably eat in the car, but the dish was flat and – I know this is a weird complaint – there were a lot of carrots involved. I think of pad see ew as a pretty specific dish – noodles, egg, a protein, and some sort of green brassica like broccoli. Maybe I just chose poorly.

I have a real soft spot for Fido, right on Broadway near Vandy’s campus, which has been my go-to breakfast spot in Nashville for probably a decade now. I’m glad to see they’re still open, and were busy on Saturday morning, although I just popped in to get a bagel sandwich to go. I also hit Barista Parlor, one of my two favorite coffee spots in Nashville along with Crema, with Kaci, one of my editors at the Athletic, and we ended up visiting two different locations in search of outdoor seating. I know people who find BP too hipster for them, and I probably should be one of them, but I love their coffee and could sit in any of their locations for hours and be quite content.

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→ April 20, 2021
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Charlottesville eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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