→ 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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→ February 24, 2019
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Los Angeles eats, 2019.

The best meal I had on my brief vacation to Los Angeles was at Rosaliné, an upscale Peruvian restaurant that particularly focuses on ceviches and paellas, all of which were superb. The corvina sea bass was the milder of the two we ordered, so the flavor and freshness of the fish shone through, while the ceviche crocante, with raw (but cured) halibut and crispy calamari, tasted more of the sauce, with tart yuzu and a good but not overpowering amount of heat. I’m not a big paella fan, since I think every version I’d ever had in restaurants used cheap rice and was dominated either by tomato or saffron, but the chaufa paella here is excellent, served smoking hot in its cast-iron skillet and tossed table-side so the crispy part of the rice gets mixed in and slightly softened by the steam (so you can chew it without breaking a tooth). It comes with prawns, pancetta, and a little sausage, while their other paella is all shellfish; there isn’t a vegetarian option on the menu but I would imagine they could accommodate you with some notice. I also recommend the pan andino, a house-made bread with quinoa that is served with a rocoto pepper butter and a botoja olive spread that are both fantastic, savory and salty and perfect for spreading on warm bread. We were way too full for dessert.

I had lunch solo at the now curiously-named A.O.C., which predates the ascendance of Ben Shapiro’s favorite Congressperson. It’s a wine bar from Suzanne Goins and Carolyne Styne of Lucques and The Larder, with a small-plates menu that focuses on foods from around the Mediterranean as well as an extensive cheese list that lets you order just a single kind (which I did, trying a pacencia, a raw sheep’s milk cheese from Spain that was like a stronger, nuttier manchego, served with bread, dried fruit, and raw walnuts). For lunch I had the brussels sprouts, radicchio, and burrata sandwich on house-made focaccia, which was a delightful mess and did not skimp on the vegetables, with aged balsamic giving some sweet/tart notes to balance the slight bitterness of those two vegetables. I didn’t plan to have dessert but when I saw the butterscotch pôt de crème with fleur de sel & salted cashew cookies I couldn’t exactly say no – the cookies were good, although I think that’s the kind of cookie that needs to be consumed within a few hours of baking, while the custard was absolutely superb in texture and flavor, with that little bit of salt and big caramel and butter flavors.

Republique, like the first two restaurants I mentioned, made the Eater list of the 38 ‘most essential’ restaurants in LA for the year – I still don’t know what they mean by ‘essential’ but I do find those lists incredibly useful when traveling and rarely have a bad experience at any of their places. It’s modern French in a very cool brick building that was supposedly once owned by Charlie Chaplin, previously occupied by the Nancy Silverton-owned Campanile. Modern French probably misrepresents the food, though, as it’s more just modern global cuisine with French influences. I went with a writer friend and we grazed our way through some of the lighter dishes, skipping the meat/fish mains. The spinach cavatelli with fresh morel mushrooms was among the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had, both because the pasta was so well-made and perfectly cooked and because the morels were … well, morels, which are generally so expensive (they only grow wild, typically after forest fires, and are harvested by hand) that I rarely get to eat them. The grilled octopus salad with multiple kinds of citrus plus pistachios and a hint of chile was another standout, as was the bread with cultured butter and the smoked eel beignets (yep, just what it sounds like, and so good) with horseradish sauce. I normally don’t care for white chocolate desserts but their caramelized white chocolate sabayon with local berries was really superb – the cloying nature of regular white chocolate is dampened by the caramelization, which converts some of the sugars and brings out a broader array of flavors than the one-note sweetness of regular white chocolate.

I met up with movie critic Tim Grierson, with whom I’ve had a longrunning email dialogue but had never actually met in person, at The Henry in west Hollywood, where I had that rarest of things, a truly memorable salad, in a rather over-the-top (if on brand for that area) space. The green garden kale salad has romanesco and broccoli along with kale, brussels sprouts, green beans, snow peas, arugula, pistachios, and comes with a tahini vinaigrette that was lighter than most tahini dressings (like goddess dressing, which I do like quite a bit, but can be heavy).

Molly Knight and I had dinner at Badmaash, a favorite of hers, located on Fairfax a few doors down from Jon & Vinny’s. Badmaash has both traditional Indian dishes and some strange mashups like Chicken Tikka Poutine – fries topped with gravy and chicken tikka and cheese curds, good but definitely too heavy for me – and chili cheese naan, where the naan dough is wrapped around cheese and serranos and comes out like a stuffed pizza (but much better than that, obviously). The traditional samosa and rosemary naan were actually my favorite dishes, though, because they were so simple but well done, and since I seldom eat Indian food because there are so many things on Indian restaurant menus I can’t eat.

Stella Barra pizzeria is a solid 50 for me, which probably puts it in the lower tier of my pizzeria rankings since I tend to avoid places I hear are below-average; I thought their dough was quite good if stretched a little too thick, and don’t love that their white pizzas come with a ‘parmesan cream sauce,’ whatever that is – true white Neapolitan pizzas shouldn’t have anything like that. But the toppings on the two pizzas we tried, the sausage and fennel as well as the spinach & kale with garlic and green onions, were very high quality. I’m usually a purist when it comes to old-fashioneds, but their lavender-tinged version was surprisingly good.

I did all my coffee-ing at Verve and Andante, as well as tea in both spots as well; Verve was slightly better in both categories, especially for pour-over coffee, and they offer hojicha, my personal favorite green tea (the leaves are roasted, so the flavor is deeper and less grassy). Verve’s space was nearly always packed, while Andante had more room to chill, although one time I was in the latter’s shop near the Grove and realized I was the only person there not working on a screenplay.

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→ April 8, 2017
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Sarasota and other Florida eats.

Florida spring training kind of sucks, in my professional opinion, because the sites are so far apart and several are wastelands for decent food. I found a handful of decent spots in my week there this year, along with a lot of mediocrity, but I’ll just focus on the good here, including the fact that Sarasota of all places has a decent little food and coffee scene happening.

Baker & Wife is a farm-to-table type of place in Sarasota, recommended to me by a friend who lives nearby, and I was impressed by both the vegetable dishes and, as you’d expect from the name, the dessert. I went with two starters rather than a main, a salad of roasted yellow beets with goat cheese, pesto, and pine nuts, along with crab cakes with a spicy green papaya slaw; of all of that, the only aspect I didn’t care for was the slaw, which tasted too much of fish sauce. The beets were really spectacular, although I am a fan of roasted beets in any form, but I think they pair so well with goat cheese, any kind of nuts, and the salty, bright punch of the pesto. Dessert, I had the “baker’s bannoffie pie,” and I’ll let the menu describe it: “pecan and graham cracker crust, house made banana & vanilla bean pudding, chocolate chips, caramel, cream.” It was that good and then some. It all worked so well together.

Perq is a new third-wave coffee bar in Sarasota, using beans from various artisan roasters around the country, and offering numerous cold-brew and single-origin espresso options along with the usual. It’s a sizable cafe too, unlike a lot of third-wave spots, and they appear to rotate through various roasters – they had a number of I knew from my travels and when I chatted up one of the baristas, he mentioned several other great roasters they’ve used, like heart, Sightglass, Four barrel, Counter Culture, and more.

I had half a decent meal at Selva, a Peruvian restaurant downtown, where the ceviche was very good and the entree I had was not. The ceviche isn’t truly traditional; they have numerous combinations that include various fruits, acids, and types of fish, and the tuna/watermelon ceviche I got had larger pieces of fish than I’m used to seeing in ceviche. It came with a spicy lime sauce for dipping or pouring to taste, and I would recommend using that if you end up here. But the main course was kind of a mess – a duck breast that was cooked very inconsistently, and served with a risotto that was anything but.

There’s also a tiny Buddy Brew location right near Selva, at the entrance to the parking garage downtown not far from Tamiami Trail. I would go to Perq before this, but Buddy Brew is solid.

Elsewhere in the state, I discovered the brand new Foxtail Coffee in Orlando’s Winter Park neighborhood thanks to a scout’s recommendation, and both times I went there was a line out the door. They had four coffees available from different countries; I tried their espresso one day and an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe pour-over the next, the latter of which came with a roasting demonstration from Iain, one of the owners and a baseball fan as well. It’s right near the old location of the Ravenous Pig, which has moved into the old Cask & Larder space but which I can report is still some of the best food to be had in the Orlando area.

Near the Jupiter complex is a very unassuming little coffee shop and roaster called Oceana, which does a lot of single origins as well but roasts most of them darker than I tend to like. Their pour-over options are the way to go – I had an Ethiopian the first day I was there, and I’ll be honest in that I was so in need of the caffeine I don’t remember much beyond the sheer pleasure of feeling it hit my bloodstream. Pass on the espresso as their extraction rate is way too high and the result is watery.

Merritt Island’s Cuban Island Cafe is worth a stop if you’re in that area, which I’d never visited before; I went for my standard choice, lechon asado, which in this case came with some amazing black beans, one maduro, one tostone, and well over a half-pound of pork.

I’ll also mention Harry’s Pizzeria in Miami, which appeared on a list of the best pizzerias in the U.S. a few years ago that I’ve kept on hand for my travels, hitting more than half of the 48 places they listed. The pizza itself was just average, but I had an escarole salad to start that was tremendous – lemon, anchovies, parmiggiano, and bread crumbs. It hit a little of everything, adding salty, sour, and umami notes to the slight bitterness of the raw greens. They have a few non-pizza options that might be worth trying if I ever go back to have that salad again.

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→ October 8, 2009
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Washington DC eats.

Chat today at 1 pm EDT. Baseball Tonight on ESPN Radio at 10:27 pm EDT (if your local affiliate isn’t carrying the late game).

All right, I’ve been promising this for two weeks but playoff writing took precedence. I had two full days in DC plus a half-day, which turned into five different restaurants plus what I ate at the ballpark. All of these places but one are in the McPherson Square/Farragut area.

Breakfast both mornings was at Teaism, a tea salon that serves a full breakfast with a limited menu, although it was diverse enough for me. The best item – besides the tea, which is loose-leaf and served in ceramic pots – is the ginger scones, crumbly and faintly sweet with chunks of crystallized ginger in the scone and castor sugar on top. Two of those plus the cilantro scrambled eggs – cilantro and diced green bell pepper in eggs, little light on the salt and probably cooked 30 seconds past perfect – was more than enough food, since the egg platter comes with a small fruit salad and triangles of grilled whole-wheat naan. I also tried the tea-cured salmon, which had great flavor (a little sweet, a little savory, like a cup of a mild Indian black tea with a half teaspoon of sugar) and was obviously very fresh (they say they do the curing themselves) but had a chewier texture than good smoked salmon. Teaism’s only real drawback is that it’s not cheap, running $15+ each day including tip.

Worst meal of the trip, by far, was at Kaz Sushi Bistro, an overpriced Japanese restaurant where the focus is definitely not on the food. The fish itself was completely tasteless; the seaweed salad came with a mayonnaise-based dressing; everything was overpriced; and the two people serving as hosts were rude to each other and to at least one group of customers.

Casa Blanca is a small Peruvian (or Peruvian-plus) place on Vermont Ave that is an anti-Kaz in that the focus is on the food and definitely not on the decor or ambience. I ordered chicharrones (fried chunks of pork shoulder) with fried yucca, which was, of course, a bit on the heavy side but crispy and salty with a little bit of a peppery kick. Their homemade tamarind juice is good, a little too sweet for me but given the tangy taste of tamarind, I imagine this is how most people prefer the drink. They apparently also make great empanadas, although those appeared to be for takeout customers and weren’t on the menu. Service is a bit indifferent, and remained so even when I ordered in Spanish. Cash only.

I left the area once for lunch and headed over to Eastern Market to try Market Lunch, where folks apparently line up in great numbers on weekend mornings for pancakes. I had read that Market Lunch had one of the top crab cake sandwiches in the city, and their fries are hand-cut, which sold me. The crab cake was above-average, mostly crab, all lump, lightly seasoned so that the primary taste is of the crab meat, but the crab cake itself wasn’t fresh or even hot, just lukewarm, as if it had been sitting for five minutes. I understand they’re trying to keep people moving, but crab cakes should, at worst, be kept hot if they have to be held at all. The fries were on the greasy side. I suppose if you work in the area and need something fast, this is a great option, but I’m not sure it was worth the Metro* trip.

*Seriously, another city with a crappy subway system. Philly’s system is cash-only and is filthier than Rome’s. Washington’s takes credit cards, but the cost of your ride depends on exactly where you’re boarding and exiting, instead of the single-price system used, oh, everywhere else in the country. And is there a reason the stations are all so dark? You could grow white asparagus down there.

As for Nationals Park, it’s nice, clean, big, and kind of boring. It has forced character, not actual charm. And I’m sorry, you don’t get to put up posters of great players who didn’t play for your franchise – you can take the Senators’ history, by all means, but Honus Wagner is not yours. They get big props for Teddy’s Q stand out in right field. They smoke the meat right there, in a smoker that’s at the edge of the tent, and both items I had were solid. The pulled pork sandwich wasn’t too dry and only needed a little sauce for flavor, while the beef (short) rib was perfectly smoked with plenty of well-browned edges. I’m not sure what’s in the beef rub, but it’s sweet without any heat – a little pepper would balance out the sweetness well. Two quibbles: At $14, the rib should come with something on the side, even the tiny cole slaw that comes with the sandwich; and it seems odd that you have to go to another stand to get a starch like French fries. The Nats also get props for the kosher-food cart across the aisle from the Q. The knish was excellent, smoking hot (not just made, but they had the sense to keep it hot), and the three people working at the cart are animals – everything moved quickly, and when the line started to build up, they moved faster. I saw a little gelato stand up the first base line and wanted to try it, but I was so full from the Q each night that I never had the chance.

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