→ July 1, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 7/1/17.

Couple of Insider posts this week – one with reactions to the initial rosters for the Futures Game and one on top prospects for tomorrow’s international free agent signing period. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon en route to Lakewood from Bristol.

My latest boardgame review for Paste is the two-player game Santorini, which has some light chess/Othello elements to it but is played on a smaller board (5×5) that keeps the games a bit shorter.

Thanks to everyone who’s already bought Smart Baseball; sales spiked this month between Father’s Day and the positive review in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve got book signings coming up:

* Miami, Books and Books, July 8th
* Harrisburg, Midtown Scholar, July 15th
* Berkeley, Books Inc., July 19th
* Chicago, Volumes, July 28th, 7:30 pm
* GenCon (Indianapolis), August 17th-20th

If you’re with an independent bookstore and would like to host a signing, please contact Danielle Bartlett at HarperCollins; we’re trying to accommodate everyone we can within my work schedule.

I also spoke with Sportsnet about the book, anxiety, and the 2017 Blue Jays.

And now, the links…

  • Russell Carleton looks at the utility of pickoff throws over at Baseball Prospectus.
  • This isn’t surprising if you follow Zack Greinke at all, but the pitcher told MLB.com’s Steve Gilbert how he used Statcast data to help turn his 2016 season around.
  • “The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians.” Long, and you may have seen it, but it seems like more evidence of wrongdoing from the Trump campaign last summer.
  • VICE details a planned (or, really, hypothetical) pay-for-play college basketball league that would focus on the Historically Black Colleges & Universities that have largely missed out on the financial windfall of modern college basketball.
  • The mother of an immune-compromised daughter who was hospitalized recently because she was exposed to chicken pox lashed out at vaccine deniers for putting her daughter’s life at risk. Your decision not to vaccinate your kids isn’t just about your own neglect, but potentially harms other vulnerable people in your community.
  • If you heard that a European Union court ruled against vaccine safety, well, not really.
  • A research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine looks at benefits of increased health insurance coverage under the ACA, including lower costs of reduction in mortality rates compared to other policies. (One of the authors is Dr. Atul Gawande, the author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto.)
  • Eater has a great profile of gelato maker Meredith Kurtzman, who recently retired after two decades in the NYC food scene, working at restaurants (notably at Mario Batali’s Otto) and earning plaudits from chefs and restaurateurs for her work. It’s a wonderful piece because it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Kurtzman isn’t a very engaging or even likable subject.
  • The NY Times is now charging for access to its cooking site, which … is fine, actually. I know there’s always a backlash when sites charge for content, but if you want good content, you’re going to have to start paying for it somewhere. I subscribe to their main site, the Washington Post, and Fine Cooking magazine, among others. However, charging for recipes is tricky because they can’t be copyrighted – you can copyright text, but not the specifics of a recipe – which makes this a little different than most subscriber walls.
  • The great BBC series Broadchurch just returned on Wednesday for its third and final season, and IndieWire ran a Q&A with star David Tennant that’s more insightful than the standard “actor talks about series he didn’t write but explains everything anyway” sort of piece.
  • The Koch Brothers plan to spend $400 million to help elect conservative Republican candidates in 2018. Repealing Obamacare and reducing taxes on the highest earners are two of their main policy priorities.
  • Daniel Vaughn’s latest list of the top 50 BBQ joints in Texas came out a few weeks ago for Texas Monthly, and if you’re visiting that state, it’s a great resource. (If you live there, well, I’m sorry.)
  • The new Presidential commission on so-called “voter fraud” – which does not actually exist on any significant scale – is really just an attack on voting rights. Even some GOP-led states are declining the requests for state voter information. Delaware hasn’t made any statement yet, but I have reached to the Secretary of State, asking them to refuse to comply.
  • Sen. Al Franken very calmly de-pantsed Energy Secretary Rick Perry on climate change, helped by Perry’s apparent lack of any knowledge on the subject whatsoever.
  • Whole Foods had long contributed to local farmers both in access to markets and in providing low-interest loans to help farmers ramp up operations to serve the chain. Now the farmers worry these programs will end after amazon’s purchase of the retailer.
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→ September 5, 2014
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More NYC pizza and gelato.

Today’s Klawchat went well, I think. I’ll be back on BBTN tonight at 1:30 am Eastern.

I’ve gotten to two more spots from that (somewhat dubious) Food and Wine list of the nation’s best pizzerias, both in Manhattan, home to eleven of the 43 restaurants to make their cut. I still have five left in New York City, three of which (Di Fara, Paulie Gee’s, Sottocasa) are tricky because their hours are limited.

Forcella boasts three locations in the city, with the original in Brooklyn; I went to their NoHo location, on the Bowery between 2nd and 3rd (that’s Manhattan, for those of you unfamiliar with NYC neighborhoods). Their biggest claim to fame is as one of the first pizzerias, perhaps the first, to introduce the Neapolitan style of pizza known as “pizza montanara,” where the dough is quickly deep-fried to set and slightly crisp the crust, after which it’s topped and baked in a hot oven like most authentic Neapolitan pizzas are. This was my first experience with any kind of fried pizza, so I have no means of comparison, but I can say it was spectacular – the direct contact of the hot oil with the crust produces far more caramelization of the exterior starches and sugars than you’ll get from the indirect heat of a hotter oven, and there’s a hint of the flavor of a zeppole (the Italian take on fried dough, often served in a paper bag and drowned in powdered sugar). The crushed tomatoes were bright and very sweet, but I might argue for a little more cheese so you’re not just eating a plate of (delicious) fried bread. It is a steal at $9, by the way.


Pizza montanara at Forcella.

Rubirosa is a full-fledged Italian restaurant that happens to serve very good pizza. I saw it on Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring, a fairly unassuming storefront that hides a larger seating area in the back. Rubirosa’s pizza isn’t true Neapolitan style, as it has very little exterior “lip” and is more cracker-like underneath, as opposed to the traditional wet-centered Neapolitan style. While the toppings were a little more generous than those at Forcella, the tomatoes weren’t as bright and their acidity overpowered the rest of the pizza because the crust was so thin. I enjoy these crispier crusts, like those at the Grimaldi’s chain in Arizona (I haven’t tried their NY outposts yet), but it’s a different product than true Neapolitan pizza, where you can really taste and feel the craft of the baker behind the bread. Also, at $17 for a small pizza, it’s overpriced for what you get.

Mo’ Gelato‘s coffee gelato is some of the strongest-flavored I’ve ever tasted, although that’s not saying much considering how most coffee-flavored gelatos, even those dubbed “espresso” flavor, often taste about as much like coffee as a light-and-sweet cup of swill from Dunkin’ Donuts. Mo’ Gelato’s looks darker and tastes it, so that the sweetness has real balance from the sharp note of roasted coffee. Their chocolate sorbet was a little pale in comparison, even though its color and flavor are both very dark – the lack of any kind of additional fat created a hollow flavor that, paired with the butterfat in the coffee gelato, seemed flat.

Il Buco Alimentaria is an Italian market and sandwich/small plates shop that also serves a small selection of gelato flavors, about eight when I visited, dished up by a rather fetching Sicilian woman who looked about as Italian as I do (which is to say, not much). Their chocolate gelato was superb, very smooth with a pudding-like flavor and texture, a rich semi-sweet chocolate that wasn’t extremely dark but less cloying or sweet than milk chocolate. The caramel gelato, however, was way too mild; in an era of sea salt caramel gelato and ice cream, weak caramel flavors just won’t cut it.

The next pizza stop will probably be Via Tribunali, an import to Manhattan from Seattle that is the only one of the F&W pizzerias in Manhattan that I haven’t tried and that is open for lunch.

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→ September 6, 2013
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Keste and more NYC eats.

I’m chatting today at 1 pm ET.

In the last three weeks, I’ve hit three more places from Food and Wine‘s list of the 48 best pizzerias in the country (I don’t know why they chose 48, and it’s 47 now anyway with one closed), and I’ve at least found one rival to Pizzeria Bianco for the best pizzeria in the country, as well as hitting the first of the four spots from the list located in Brooklyn.

Keste, located on Bleecker in Greenwich Village, is run by an Italian pizzaiolo who was born and raised outside of Naples and learned the craft of pizza-making in that city, the capital of pizza in Italy. The style is true Neapolitan, with a thin crust and a soft center so that the crust struggles to support the toppings, and Keste does it correctly, something few places that boast of serving “authentic” Neapolitan pizzas manage to do. The menu is quite large, with a huge selection of pizzas with tomato sauce, a small selection of “white” pizzas, and a number of gluten-free options. My friend Toby and I ordered two pizzas and split them – the margherita with buffalo mozzarella and the daily special with burrata, prosciutto, and truffle oil.

The crusts on both were spectacular, exactly as promised, with a little char on the exterior, good tooth on the exterior crust, and just enough underneath to keep the toppings off the plate and give some texture contrast. The special was among the best pizzas I’ve ever had thanks to the creaminess and bright flavor of the burrata, and the salty-but-not-too-salty prosciutto, as well as the hint of truffle flavor that didn’t overwhelm any of the other ingredients. The margherita was notable more for the brightness of the tomatoes than anything else, with good balance between that and the mozzarella di bufala. The flavors on both pizzas were loud, in a good way, and everything was balanced and fresh and just incredible.

A few weeks ago, I managed to sneak into Co., the pizzeria founded by Jim Lahey of no-knead bread fame, for dinner with my family on a trip to Boston. The crust was outstanding, as you’d expect, but the rest of the experience fell very short for us. For one thing, the pizzas were small and sparsely topped, skimping especially on cheese, which is kind of the essential ingredient when pizza is the entree because it’s the only real protein source on any pizza without meat. For another, I am not sure when I have ever been in a colder restaurant than Co. was on that night – it could not have been over 65 degrees in there – and it was incredibly loud. I was more impressed with the bread and olive oil starter, which does a better job of showing off Lahey’s technique, than I was with either of the pizzas we ordered. I’ll tolerate atmosphere issues if the food is amazing, but the crust was just good, not enough to make me want to deal with the conditions there.

Franny’s in Brooklyn was an outright disappointment, however – so sparsely topped that it was more like having bread for lunch than pizza, with almost nothing beyond a thin layer of tomato sauce on top. The crust was gorgeous, with some blistering on the exterior, great tooth to the exterior, and a good contrast between the edge and the interior. But man, you need to put something on top of the pizza to get me to fight my way down Flatbush to come eat at your place.

Moving on from pizza … After Keste, Toby dragged me kicking and screaming to Grom, a gelateria (one of two Groms in the city, plus a summer location in Central Park) that imports the product from Italy. Their commitment to product quality is insane, with organic eggs, spring water for their sorbets, and fruit from their own farm in Costigliole d’Asti. And the gelato is amazing – the dark chocolate “sorbet,” made with egg yolks and Colombian chocolate but no dairy, is as intense as eating a bar of very dark chocolate but with the creamy texture of actual gelato; the caffè flavor uses Guatemalan coffee beans to create a dark coffee flavor that doesn’t hide the coffee behind sugar and cream. It’s a hell of an experience even when you’re already overstuffed with pizza. (I also love that their URL is grom.it; too bad walla.ce isn’t available.)

Culture Espresso on 38th Street doesn’t roast its own coffee, but buys from some of the best roasters in the country – currently using coffees from Heart roasters in Portland, Oregon, a micro-roaster that specializes in very light roasts of single-estate coffees. Culture is currently using a blend of two coffees, an Ethiopian and a Central American (I think the barista said Colombian), which produced a medium-bodied shot that still had the bright strawberry notes of the east African half of the blend.

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→ August 1, 2012
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Tucson eats (and trade analysis links).

I blogged about every major trade from the past few days, combining some smaller ones into longer posts, which you can find here:

Today’s podcast is all prospect talk with Kevin Goldstein chatting with me about prospects from those trades and top 100 prospects who’ve disappointed so far this year.
—

I’ve been to Tuscon a handful of times this year and had some mixed success with food. My favorite spot to hit is actually a postgame stop right by the U of A campus – Allegro, a gelateria founded by two natives of Morbegna, Italy, offering a great mix of traditional flavors and more modern ones, the latter category including the best sea salt caramel gelato I’ve had (with a strong butter flavor), as well as saffron, fig, anise, and pineapple basil. It’s comparable in quality to the best gelato I’ve had in the Phoenix area, where Frost (actually based in Tucson) edges out Angel Sweet.

As for food in Tucson, the best I’ve found is probably Feast, run by local-celebrity chef Doug Levy, who actually seated me and chatted for a little while when he noticed I was reading a Michael Ruhlman book. The “date plate” starter – grilled crostini with hummus on one half and a Manchego-stuffed, pancetta-wrapped date on the other – was delicious if a little weird; I didn’t get the interplay between the two toppings, although, really, dates wrapped in bacon, people. Unfortunately, the execution of my entree, a special including achiote shrimp over jasmine rice, was poor; the shrimp weren’t hot and the dish included four hidden whole black peppercorns, which I discovered when I ended up biting into three of them at once. I need to try them again because I can tell the emphasis on fresh ingredients and inventive combinations is there, but that wasn’t the first impression I was hoping to get.

Feast’s culinary vibe and philosophy put them ahead of Kingfisher for me, even though the latter, focusing on fresh seafood, had better execution. I had a salad from their seasonal specials menu, grilled black mission figs with mixed greens and ricotta salata, with a perfect balance of sweet, sour, bitter (from the greens and radicchio), and salty. The pumpkin seed-crusted scallops in my entree were slightly overcooked and, because they were covered with the breading all the way around, didn’t have that slight sweetness that scallops develop when they are seared and allowed to brown on the exterior. The poblano aioli (with the consistency of a crema and a bright green color) and corn salsa on the plate were also somewhat overpowering, but would be great with a stronger-flavored fish like salmon. With black beans and soft jasmine rice, it was an enormous amount of food, but the delicacy of the scallops ended up overwhelmed by other elements.

I went to the tapas restaurant Casa Vicente back in March but apparently never wrote about it. Casa Vicente offers authentic Spanish tapas, heavy on seafood options. I don’t remember the meal clearly enough to give a quality review here; I remember finding it solid, with the “plaza mayor”-style fried calamari and the patatas bravas (fried potato chunks, served with a spicy red vinegar sauce and a garlic aioli) both successful.

Finally, I haven’t been to Beyond Bread this summer, but should mention it as one of my favorite sandwich places anywhere, primarily because their bread is so good. They have three locations in Tucson and are open late enough (8 pm) for you to grab something before heading to a night game at Hi Corbett Field or Kino Veterans Park.

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→ July 24, 2012
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Phoenix eats roundup, July 2012.

Today’s column at ESPN ranks the top ten prospects in contenders’ organizations by their current trade value. I’ll be back on the podcast on Wednesday.

Chou’s Kitchen in northwest Chandler, at Warner and Alma School, serves regional Chinese cuisine from northeastern China, known as dongbei cai, from the area generally known in English as Manchuria. Because the climate in the area is less favorable for growing rice than that of central and southern China, northeastern Chinese cooking includes more wheat, which means lots of dumplings, including the thick, doughy filled dumplings known as baozi. Chou’s version is less doughy than the baozi I’ve had elsewhere and was more like an oversized “potsticker,” meaning a better ratio of filling (pork and vegetables) to dough. I preferred those to the “meat pies,” large discs with a thinner dough and the same filling (they also offer beef, shrimp, or vegetable fillings), fried on both sides, with more meat and less dough – still good, but not as balanced as the baozi. Their version of tiger salad (lao hu cai) incorporates sliced fresh green cabbage and peanuts with the traditional combination of cilantro, scallions, and chili pepper, with enough to serve two people and a great balance of acidity, heat, and sweetness. All of that food – more than I was able to finish – cost about $17 before tip, and the service was very attentive; the owner even came out to ask me how I’d found them. They’re in Phoenix magazine’s current issue, listing over great “cheap eats” from around the Valley.

And so is My Arepa, which shares a space with a Rosati’s Pizza, a strange arrangement that didn’t give me great confidence when I entered. The food was very good, and apparently they’ve got a small following among Venezuelan Cubs players, with signed photos from several on the walls (including Carlos Zambrano and Angel Guzman). The menu is enormous but we ordered one item from the three main categories – one arepa, one empanada, and one cachapa. Arepas are thin pancakes made from ground corn meal, sliced the long way and filled like a sandwich. My Arepa’s masa is made from white corn, so it’s pretty bland (I’ve had yellow-corn arepas a few times and prefer them, but I guess that’s not authentic), with the fillings – braised shredded beef, sweet plantains, and black beans – more than making up for the dough’s lack of flavor. The cachapa, a yellow-corn pancake with kernels in the batter, folded in half like an omelette and filled, was the best item we tried, sweet from both the corn kernels and from caramelization on the griddle, with the same options for the fillings as the arepas. The place itself is pretty bare-bones, from the furniture to the décor, and could probably use a little facelift. Both Chou’s and My Arepa are inside of 15 minutes from HoHoKam.

Also in that Phoenix magazine feature was Baratin Cafe, located in Old Town Scottsdale just off 5th street, in a walkway across Craftsman from Citizen Public House. Baratin’s menu is as small as they come, changing daily, with one starter, one salad, one sandwich, one vegetarian option, one “potted” entree, and one dessert. The day I went, the starter was roasted tomatoes and garlic with basil, olive oil, and grilled slices of rosemary-olive bread, and the sandwich was a pulled pork with spicy whole-grain mustard, sliced apples, and cole slaw on a crispy flatbread from Mediterra Bakehouse in Coolidge. Business is slow everywhere here in the summer, but it can’t be a good sign that I was the only customer at 6 pm on a Saturday evening – this place is far too good for that, and quite reasonably priced for some of the highest-quality ingredients I’ve come across out here, about $18 for those two items plus a drink.

Tortas Paquime in Avondale is one of the few independent restaurants I’ve found on the west side worth hitting, close to the Glendale stadium and on the way from my house to Goodyear, serving, of course, tortas, Mexican sandwiches on soft white bread (they also offer whole wheat) with the usual array of meat fillings. Torta ahogada (“drowned” in sauce) is the most traditional, but I went for the cochinita pibil with “everything” – avocado, tomato, lettuce, jalapeno (and a lot of it), and mayo, served with a handful of homemade potato chips for $5.49. This pork was still tender and had a good balance of acidity and smokiness from the achiote, nicely cut by the fats from the avocado and mayonnaise. They also offer tacos, various pastries, and six flavors of agua fresca.

Il Bosco is a new, tiny, wood-fired pizza shop in north Scottsdale, tucked into a strip mall on a side street on the northeast corner of Scottsdale and Shea. Their site says they cook their pizzas at 900 degrees, but I chatted with the pizzaiolo a little bit and he said he’s found the ideal temperature is between 700 and 800, which produces a pizza somewhere between Italian style (ultra thin crust, more charring on the outside) and New York style (moderately thin crust, toppings cooked a little further). The menu is small and simple, with a handful of standard pizzas plus a daily special; that option on the night we went was superb: homemade meatballs, sliced thinly like sausages, with three cheeses and rapini, a vegetable I don’t usually like unless it’s cooked at a hot enough temperature to bring out some of its sugars. The salads are extremely fresh and the restaurant grows its own herbs in pots out back. The service was off the charts, and the owner even let my daughter come behind the counter and see how some of the equipment worked while she poured her own drink.

I’ve mentioned Frost Gelato on Twitter as our new favorite gelateria in the Valley, just barely edging out Angel Sweet (which we do still love). Frost, located in the Santan Mall, has two locations in Tucson as well as one in Chicago now, and was started by two U of A alumni who hired – and somehow secured a “special skills” O-1 visa for – an Italian gelato chef to help them devise the recipe. The gelato’s texture is perfect and their flavors are strong, including dark chocolate, salted caramel, and coconut, with only the bitter, extract-y mint chocolate chip disappointing so far.

La Condesa Gourmet Tacos made Phoenix magazine’s list of the best new restaurants of 2011 and was recommended by several friends of mine who rave about its salsa bar, which is quite extensive. But the food itself was very disappointing. The cochinita pibil tasted of nothing but vinegar, while the carne asada was tough and surprisingly bland. Worse, however, was the corn tortillas themselves: If you aren’t making the tortillas fresh in-house, you’re not a “gourmet” taco shop. These were the same tortillas I could buy at Target in a package of 30 for $2. Stop spending so much time on strawberry salsa and start making tortillas from scratch (and grilling them, while we’re at it), and then we can talk.

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→ February 12, 2012
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Osteria Mozza.

I had dinner on Friday night at Osteria Mozza, one of the most popular and famous restaurants in Los Angeles at the moment, joined by my friend and colleague Molly Knight, a known cheese enthusiast and a veteran diner at Mozza. The restaurant is the brainchild of three luminaries in American food, including Mario Batali, who likely needs no introduction. The primary force behind the restaurant and its neighbor, Pizzeria Mozza (next visit!), is Nancy Silverton, co-founder of the legendary La Brea Bakery as well as of Campanile restaurant, where she previously served as pastry chef. The third partner, Joseph Bastianich, is a vintner, restaurateur, and son of Lidia Bastianich, the matron of Italian-American cooking. Names like these don’t always guarantee success, of course, but in this case, the restaurant lives up to its pedigree. Everything we had was outstanding; I would say some dishes were more outstanding than others, but nothing we ordered was less than plus.

The server said the menus are updated daily, so there are no off-menu specials. We went with two starters, two primi (pastas), and one secondo (main), plus a dessert and two beers. I believe it’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever paid for myself, just barely surpassing Craftsteak. The wine list looked extensive, as you’d expect given Bastianich’s involvement, but as I can’t drink red wine and couldn’t see white standing up to the duck ragù I went for the smaller beer list instead.

For starters, Molly humored me by letting me order the testina con salsa gribiche, better known in English by the unfortunate moniker “head cheese.” It’s not actually cheese, but is a terrine or aspic made by simmering the cleaned head of a pig (or sometimes cow) so the remaining the cheek and jowl meat ends up set in a gelatin from all of the connective tissue that surrounds it. The resulting terrine can be sliced and served cold, but Mozza slices it thickly, breads one side, and pan-fries it, serving it with a sauce gribiche, an emulsion of egg yolks and mustard to which one adds capers, chopped pickles, and herbs. (One might compare this dish, then, to a hot dog with mustard and relish, but I wouldn’t want to be so crass about it.) The result is very rich, with the strongly-flavored meat surrounded in luxurious gelatin that produces a fat-like mouth feel, while I left thinking I really need to use sauce gribiche a lot more often at home. The pan-frying, by the way, gets rid of the one real objection you might have to head cheese – the stuff looks like the result of some sort of processing accident.

You could build an entire meal just from Mozza’s selection of starters based around fresh mozzarella without getting bored, but we both zeroed in on the burrata (fresh mozzarella wrapped around a suspension of mozzarella bits in cream) with bacon, marinated escarole and caramelized shallots, which I think was my favorite item of the night. The saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, the acidity of the marinated escarole, and the sharp sweetness of the shallots were all beautifully balanced and gave depth to compliment the creamy texture of the cheese, which, while extremely fresh (of course), was mild in flavor.

I would have probably told you before Friday night that I wasn’t a big fan of potato gnocchi, but apparently I’d just never had a truly great rendition prior to tasting Mozza’s gnocchi with duck ragù, a dish we ordered primarily because I’ll eat just about any dish with duck in it. The ragù was strong, with deep earthly flavors and small chunks of tender breast meat, but played a clear second fiddle to those little pillows of love, lighter than any potato gnocchi I’d previously tried. It’s the kind of meat-and-potatoes dish I could stand behind.

Molly ordered one of her favorite primi, the goat cheese ravioli with five lilies sauce. The pasta was as thin as I’ve ever come across in ravioli, but with good tooth thanks to strong gluten development, wrapped around a thin layer of assertive chevre-style goat cheese; those thin wrappers produce a much better pasta/filling ratio than you typically get from filled pastas. The “five lilies” sauce refers to five members of the allium family – garlic, onion, chives, scallions, and leeks – which stands up well to the tangy goat cheese.

We went with one main, the short rib braised in Barolo wine and served over a very soft, creamy polenta. I’ve never met a short rib dish I didn’t like, and the braise was perfect, producing a rib that stands up on the plate but pulls apart with no effort. If I was to criticize anything we had all night, it might be that the exterior of the short rib was on the soft side, so it might not have been seared that much (it was definitely seared at some point) before the braise. But the criticism is a bit absurd, as the dish was still a 70.

For dessert, we went with the house-made gelato, mint chip and coffee side-by-side with a giant pizzelle with a faint anise flavor. The texture was perfectly smooth, no hint of ice crystals or of extra overrun; the coffee was a little sweeter than I like my coffee ice creams (but I admit I like coffee and chocolate ice creams to be as dark as possible), while the mint chip surprised with real mint flavor – not like an extract, but like actual mint leaves, brighter, fresher, and less harsh than your typical mint-flavored ice creams. (Plus, it wasn’t green.)

We sat at one of the two bars in Osteria Mozza and, at 7 pm on a Friday, didn’t have to wait to be seated, but there were no regular tables available before 10:30 pm at that point. (I actually love sitting at the bar in restaurants, alone or with a friend; you’re rarely forgotten by your server and you often get to see a lot of what’s going on in the kitchen, or at least what’s coming out of it.) The prices are not for the faint of heart, but as I said to Molly when we left, this wasn’t so much dinner but an experience, the kind of meal you might only have a few times in your life, but one you’ll think about for weeks afterwards.

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→ October 28, 2010
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East Valley eats.

One music note (pun intended) before I get to the food: Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs (best album I’ve heard in 2010) and their debut album Funeral are both just $5 as mp3 downloads on amazon.com, probably just through the end of the month (Sunday night). Their second album, Neon Bible, is just $5.99 as a download, but I don’t think that disc measures up – you could buy “Keep the Car Running” and call it a day.

–

Jason Grey has been trying to get me to try Rancho de Tia Rosa in Mesa for at least three years now, but it was never convenient until we moved to this part of the Valley. (When we were here for spring training, we’d stay in north Scottsdale, near Kierland, so heading out to eastern Mesa for dinner was a haul and would have screwed with my daughter’s bed time.) The restaurant absolutely lived up to expectations, especially since, like Ortega’s in San Diego, Tia Rosa makes their own old-school flour tortillas, the biggest delimiter for me between an ordinary Mexican restaurant and an above-average one. We’ve been there once so far, although we’re going again soon, and the portions are generous with very fresh ingredients. I ordered the carne asada, figuring I’d start with a classic dish (the menu has a mix of classics and modern Mexican cuisine); the flavor was outstanding, deep, smoky, not too salty, but unfortunately the meat had dried out a little, probably because it was slow-cooked all day and then held a little too warm for service. I don’t pay extra for ambiance, but my wife was impressed by the building and décor inside; I’m more about the tortillas and salsas and bright flavors, enough that I’m willing to give them a pass on the dryness of the main course.

In downtown Mesa on Main Street, there’s a small lunch place called Mangos that apparently keeps inconsistent hours for dinner, but for lunch it’s more of a nicer twist on a taco shop. Their fish taco is the best I’ve ever had, hot, crispy, non-greasy, with just enough seasoning, and their aguas frescas were outstanding – I went with the cashier’s recommendation, a mix of watermelon and pineapple. The shrimp taco wasn’t as good as the fish taco, mostly because it seemed undersalted, but all ingredients on both tacos were fresh, and the tacos plus beans and rice ran about $11 for more food than I could think about eating. Mangos has a sister restaurant in downtown Chandler called El Zocalo that is just a poor imitation of Tia Rosa, as expensive but with inferior product; you’re paying mostly for setting and atmosphere, and I’d rather pay for the food.

The Urban Grocery and Wine Bar at the Phoenix Public Market doesn’t have an extensive menu, but the market itself is worth checking out. At the grocery counter you can order a few sandwich items, including a roast beef sandwich that feels artisanal through all of its ingredients, from the baguette to the spicy mustard to the unusual pickles, and the sandwich is generously filled. My only complaint was that the roast beef was sliced thickly and incorrectly, resulting in a very tough product that detracted from the experience, but if that’s not the norm, it’s a steal at $7.

For pizza, I’d still call Grimaldi’s the tops among casual places in the area, but Florencia’s on Ray in Ahwautukee (near 40th) does a very solid rendition of New York-style pizza, with just a little too much sauce separating them from NYC slice-dom. The Italian sausage had a nice pronounced fennel note, and the sauce isn’t sweet as it too often is outside of New York. The pesto was a little oily for me but had a good balance of basil, garlic, and cheese. The garden salad, while basic, has always included very fresh ingredients, and the homemade balsamic dressing is solid if a touch thin.

We’ve tried three local dessert options, two of which are gelaterias. The winner there is Angel Sweet, on Chandler Blvd just east of Dobson, tucked in a strip mall with a Starbucks and a Basha’s. The owner of Angel Sweet – whom we’ve never seen – is reportedly Japanese, but I think he has an Italian soul given how incredibly smooth and precise his gelatos are. The super dark chocolate does not boast without cause, as it is about as black as the last banana with strong cocoa flavor, while the mint is actually a straciatella with an unusually round, full mint flavor. The panna cotta and crème caramel are similar, but I prefer the darker caramel notes in the panna cotta. The coconut, one of my two bellwether flavors along with dark chocolate, is bright and fresh and not too sweet. My wife and daughter are both big fans of the seasonal pumpkin pie flavor.

The other gelateria we’ve found is Enzo’s, on Ray Road, run by an emigrant from Italy who also pulls what looks like a legit shot of espresso. He’s extremely friendly, but unfortunately the gelato we had was slightly grainy and didn’t have the same powerful flavors as Angel Sweet’s. Che peccato.

Cake Cafe on Ray Rd in Ahwautukee is primarily a cupcake shop that also sells custom cakes, typically selling a dozen or so cupcake flavors on any given day. I’d call it fringe-average, not quite as good as Sprinkles (which to me is the definition of solid-average, useful since it’s likely some of you have tried it) because the cupcakes tend to be slightly dry, and the frosting portions are a little meager. The buttercreams are smooth and rich with solid flavors, as good as my own but made with (I assume) less swearing. At $2 apiece they’re actually a good value relative to what most cupcake shops charge.

Finally, to the burger debate. It started on Twitter when someone asked if I’d tried Smash Burger, which I did shortly afterwards, but devolved into a partisan Five Guys/In-n-Out argument, which I assume was geographically motivated. Smash Burger itself was a big disappointment; other than the fact that the burger was extremely hot when it reached the table, there was nothing good about the meal. The burger was greasy, but not with the rich, fulfilling flavor of beef fat – it tasted of the grill, of a thousand burgers and chicken breasts and other who-knows-what made before, a stale, slightly burned flavor that made me feel like I was in a rundown diner at 1 in the morning. The fries, covered in a rosemary-garlic mixture, weren’t fresh-cut and probably went from a freezer bag to the deep fryer. With In-n-Out here and Five Guys invading, I see no reason to think Smash Burger can succeed. Then again, I have no idea how Burger King still exists, so who knows.

As for Five Guys and In-n-Out, I stand by my assessment that Five Guys offers a better burger. Most of the counterarguments I’ve heard revolve around the In-n-Out burger package, not the meat itself. When you cook an extremely thin, tightly packed hamburger to well done, as In-n-Out does, you’re going to end up with a dry product. In-n-Out compensates for that by putting Thousand Island dressing, which at its heart is just jarred mayonnaise, on the bun, which adds fat back to the sandwich and keeps the bottom bun from getting soggy, but the burger itself is as dry as it gets. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: Order a plain burger at both In-n-Out and Five Guys – no cheese, no condiments, no vegetation. Just the burger. Five Guys also cooks their burgers to well done – I wish they would stop at medium well – but the burger is thicker and loosely packed, so it retains some moisture and fat. I just don’t see any comparison.

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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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→ December 14, 2008
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Las Vegas eats.

I was pretty much full for four days straight in Las Vegas; I hit an In-n-Out on the way to the hotel, ended up hungry that afternoon because I had an early lunch and a late dinner, and wasn’t hungry again until I landed at Newark on Friday morning. I’d say that’s a successful trip. I’ll start with breakfast.

Breakfast

I would say that if you don’t mind dropping a little coin and getting a little fat at breakfast, you must hit Café Bouchon in the Venetian. Granted, Jeff Erickson of Rotowire and I were in the mood to try everything, so we might have ordered too much, but everything looked so damn good. The key was the $12 plate of four pastries of your choice; we went with the two pastries of the day, the baked apple croissant and the chocolate-almond croissant, and two off the menu, the lemon-currant scone and the sticky pecan roll. This came first, and I had a sugar high going before the rest of the food came, mostly because once I started eating the pastries I couldn’t stop. The apple croissant had been split the long way, topped with crumbs, and baked until the crumbs browned. The chocolate almond croissant was messy, as good chocolate desserts usually are, with dark chocolate and sliced almonds that were falling out of and off the pastry. Those were the two best pastries of the four, although the scone and sticky bun were good. The scone had a perfect balance of sweetness and lemon flavor, but the sticky bun … well, I’m not sure how you complain about a sticky bun being sticky, but there you go. For the meal, I ordered a bowl of yogurt with honey and strawberries, which was huge but otherwise unremarkable (I’m just a big yogurt eater), and the “French toast” which was more like a bread pudding, served as a ring-molded tower with sliced apples and the maple syrup already incorporated. The toast was soggy – not moist but firm, like in a bread pudding, but just plain soggy. I left most of it and went back to the pastries. Jeff ordered the sourdough waffles with bananas, about which he raved; I hate sourdough waffles and pancakes, so there was no point in filching a bite off his plate. Besides, I’d rather do that to Sheehan because he gets more annoyed it about it.

Update, 2012: I revisited Bouchon in April and had their version of chicken and waffles, roasted chicken with hunter’s sauce and a savory, ultra-crisp waffle, that, while not traditional, was probably the best chicken and waffles dish I’ve ever had.

I went to breakfast at Payard Bistro over at Caesar’s twice. The first time, I inadvertently stopped at the café outside the restaurant, thinking that was all there was; the chocolate croissant was fine, but probably made the day before, and the yogurt/granola parfait featured fresh berries but the “granola” was obviously a bar that had been broken up into pieces. The second time I actually found the restaurant, which is just a single room cordoned off from the main restaurant, and it wins huge points for the setup: It’s a circle with the cooking station in the center, so no matter where you sit, you can see something that the chef is doing. Their menu wasn’t that well tailored to me, with a lot of dishes that included cheese and/or ham (I hate American ham), so I went with the three eggs and potatoes. The eggs, scrambled, were light and fluffy, cooked just to the point of “done” and then stopped on a dime, so they weren’t runny but weren’t dry; they could have used some more seasoning, and they weren’t the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had, but they were done perfectly, if that makes any sense. The potatoes were ridiculous: fingerlings, halved, cooked in butter until brown, with salt and some herbs. They’re called “pommes rissolet,” a typo for “rissolé,” which means browned in butter (or another animal fat) until browned, and for potatoes can also imply that they were blanched before browning. Of course, all of this wasn’t cheap – about $22, including an expensive pot of tea, before tax and tip. For the same price, you could go to Bouchon, have the four-pastry selection, yogurt, and tea, and be much more satisfied.

Dinner/lunch

The one meal for which I didn’t leave the hotel was lunch, since I didn’t think I could sacrifice that much time in the middle of the day. I went to the Bellagio’s buffet twice, having heard from several people that it was the best buffet on the Strip, and it was actually quite good. The oak-roasted salmon is addictive – perfectly cooked, with a strong, almost smoky flavor of oak. The soy-chili marinated flank steak, duck legs in peanut sauce, and large pastry selection were other highlights; the vegetables were mostly mediocre, the St. Louis ribs were a little boring, and the stir-fried bok choy was very bitter. I stayed away from the sushi bar – no way it’s good, even if it’s fresh – and took the bartender’s (good) recommendations for dessert: chocolate-raspberry mousse and the chocolate-chocolate chip cookies.

I was dying to hit Firefly, a tapas bar on Paradise just off the Strip, after hearing about it on Food Network a few years ago, and liked it enough to go twice. (For research purposes, of course.) The first trip was with Alex Speier of WEEI.com, probably a more adventurous eater than I am, which makes him a good dining partner for (wait for it) research purposes. Anyway, despite some below-average dishes, the food was, on the whole, incredible. If you go there knowing what to order, you should do extremely well, and the prices are very reasonable for the strip. I can’t think of a better way to do this than with bullet points:

  • Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds: The one dish I ordered twice. The perfect marriage of sweet, salty, smoky, and tart (from the red wine reduction). They’re like candy. Only bacon-ier.
  • Boquerones: Spanish white anchovies, served as canapés on long pieces of toast with roasted red pepper and yellow peppers. They’re nothing like the anchovies you might find on a pizza or in a tin at the supermarket; they’re fresh and soft and just a little bit salty, and since they’re fish, you can pretend that the dish constitutes health food.
  • Artichoke toasts: Same idea, but with a piece of artichoke heart sitting on a toast on a thin layer of “aïoli” (which has become a fancypants synonym for “mayonnaise”), sliced roasted red pepper, and chiffonade of basil. Again, completely fresh, and easy to inhale.
  • Crispy duck rolls with cherry hoisin: I didn’t care for these, but Alex did. The roll’s exterior was greasy, and the hoisin was too sweet/tangy and overwhelmed the flavor of the duck.
  • Pork empanada: Fried, rather than baked, which was a disappointment, because in a tapas bar I expect things to lean more towards the Spanish style. The inside was mushy, the outside was greasy, and the empanada was doused in “aïoli.” I didn’t even eat half of it.
  • Patatas bravas: Now this was a good use of aioli, both in application and in the light hand used to apply it. Small red potatoes roasted in olive oil and tossed with rosemary, finished with a little bit of a spicy mayonnaise.
  • Chicken and chorizo stuffed mushrooms: Nothing special – small creminis stuffed with a tiny amount of chorizo – if there was chicken in there, it was hidden by the sausage – and served with some sort of cheese melted to the bottom of the dish. I’m not sure what the point of the cheese was.
  • Chocolate tres leches cake: An afterthought order that was the star of the show. It’s not a traditional tres leches cake, with a cream or custard filling or some sort of frosting; instead, you get two wedges of a strong cocoa-flavored cake, doused in a mixture of what I assume is three milks (condensed, evaporated, and milk or cream), although the sauce was thinner than I expected, and I doubt it was soaked for the full three hours given the firmness of the cake. It was amazing, with the vanilla/nutmeg flavor of the sauce doing just enough to cut the potential harshness of the cocoa, everything working together to give this chocolate-eggnog flavor that defies prose description. I had to stop eating it only because I was fit to burst.

Alex and I also ventured out to Lotus of Siam, considered one of the best Thai restaurants in the country, a little further off the Strip on Sahara. Neither of us felt qualified to comment on whether it really is one of the best, but it was very good and the service was outstanding. At the server’s suggestion, we started with a Yum Nuah salad, with sliced flank steak and vegetables over mixed greens with a spicy lime-chili dressing. This was about the limit of my spice tolerance, although it was delicious, and I’m pretty sure Alex was mocking me under his breath. I ordered Khao Soi, a northern Thai dish of egg noodles, beef, red onion, and picked vegetables, served – or, more accurately, drowned – in a faintly sweet curry and coconut cream sauce. The flavors mixed well, with the intense tartness of the pickled vegetables helping to offset the sweetness of the sauce, but I could have done with a little less liquid at the bottom of the bowl. I have no idea what Alex ordered – something else I found too hot that he found a little mild. Like Firefly, Lotus was affordable, more evidence that the key to surviving Vegas financially is to eat off the Strip when you can.

I did have one bad meal, at an apparently once-renowned restaurant called Pamplemousse. The interior screamed “faded glamour” – a stupid art-school idea – and the impression was only cemented by the waiter’s comment that a certain menu item was “Mr. Sinatra’s favorite.” (I pointed out that if I were as young as I look, that comment would have meant nothing to me.) A reader had pointed me to the restaurant, raving about the duck, so I ordered it, a roast duck breast with duck confit and roasted potatoes. The owner took my order, since the waiter was nowhere to be found in the empty dining room, and we chatted about where’s from (Aix-en-Provence). Because two large parties had cancelled, the owner left the restaurant shortly after taking my order, and about ten minutes later, the waiter comes to me and asks if I had heard the specials. I said yes, but I had ordered the duck, at which point he informed me that they were out of the duck – making it clear that he knew all along that I had ordered the duck, but was playing some sort of waiter game. This started a downhill spiral; I ordered the fish special, a pan-seared escolar that had no taste and was almost certainly frozen at some point, served with a small dome of white rice that tasted like it came right out of one of those horrid boil-in-bag packages. And it took at least a half an hour from the re-order to delivery, and at that it only arrived after I asked the waiter for an ETA on the meal. The meal also started with a crudité bucket with a nice mustard vinaigrette, but some the vegetables were obviously not fresh and had been cut hours, if not a full day, prior to serving. I imagine once upon a time this was a great restaurant, but the food world has passed it by.

Last spot worth mentioning was Café Gelato in Belagio, where you can get a “small” gelato (bigger than my fist) for $4.75. I went with dulce de leche and chocolate; it was about average, a solid 50, but no better. The gelato was smooth but a little heavy and absolutely not traditional; the chocolate had a good, dark cocoa flavor but the dulce de leche was a little weak.

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