→ August 27, 2024
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Outer Banks eats.

We spent last week in the small town of Corolla, North Carolina, at the northern tip of the Outer Banks – beyond Corolla, there are houses, but the roads aren’t paved, and you may wake up to find a wild horse hanging out in your yard. It’s very quiet, which was wonderful, but also has enough amenities that we could get whatever we needed, which also meant we could cook in the house we rented or head out to eat. So while this is probably the most obscure place for which I’ve ever written up restaurants, here’s the rundown of everything we ate on the trip.

There were two restaurants I’d recommend regardless of where they were – they weren’t just Corolla good, but legitimately good. Mama Easley’s is a fried seafood place with a solid beer selection, and the seafood was superb across the board. We were down there with another family of four, so I got to try a little of everything – the fried shrimp were the best item, but everything was fried perfectly, with no excess oil anywhere. The French fries were too spicy for the kids, with something Old Bay-like but without that odd stale flavor of actual Old Bay (sorry, Marylanders, I just think it’s overrated), while the hush puppies were a hit. My wife got the grilled bay scallops, the one non-fried item we had, and they were cooked just the way I like them, which is just the hotter side of rare – I know scallops are usually just seared so that the center is still slightly translucent, but I like it pushed a touch farther than that so they’re hot through but still tender. I ate way too much fried stuff that night, and drank a local beer (I don’t remember what sort), so I didn’t exactly feel great the next morning, but I have no regrets.

Agave Roja was the other big hit, a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall (across from the Food Lion) that goes upscale from typical Mexican restaurants in that area. We ordered take-out, so we probably missed out on a little of the experience, getting four different types of tacos – fried shrimp, fried fish, carne asada, and pollo asado. I skipped the steak, but the other three were all excellent and the shrimp was not spicy despite what was supposedly a mango-habanero salsa and chipotle aioli. The fish and shrimp came on flour tortillas, while the other two came on corn; the latter should have been doubled as they fell apart almost immediately. There was a ton of flavor on all of the tacos, both in the protein and the various toppings, although I’m not sure what was listed on the menu was exactly what we got on top of each taco.

I grabbed lunch one day at Sooey’s, a barbecue spot in the same strip mall as Agave Roja, and it was perfectly average BBQ. I got a half-rack of ribs, which the host said was her favorite item on the menu, and some collard greens and fried okra, because I was in the south and I love both of those things. The ribs were smoked properly, with a visible ring and the meat coming free from the bone, and had enough flavor on their own that they didn’t need the sauce (which was not that interesting anyway). The collards were the best item of the three, while the okra needed more salt.

We tried two pizza places in Corolla, with Corolla Pizza (located at the northern edge of town) the better of the two; it’s pretty close to New York City pizza but the crust needed to be cooked just a little more, as it had zero color on the under side. Giant Slice’s pizza was cooked more, but the toppings were nowhere near the same quality and the sauce was too sweet.

For coffee, I would suggest seeking out The Kind Cup, which is in Corolla Village, the closest thing there is to a town center here, and a short walk from the lighthouse and museum. The Kind Cup roasts their own coffee to a variety of levels, with a medium-roast for their espresso; I was a little bummed that they didn’t have any light roast on drip or for sale as whole bean that particular day, as they do roast and sell some single origins. The building is also a small art gallery and craft shop, and it’s across the street from a modest, well-curated bookshop called The Island Bookstore. I also tried the coffee and gelato at Doppio, with the gelato very good (I had the dark chocolate) and the coffee darker than I like it. Our friends got a bunch of pastries from Northern Lights Bakery & Coffee; I don’t even usually like sticky buns, but theirs was outstanding. Apparently there’s a line out the door most mornings within an hour of them opening, according to the locals.

Beyond food, Flying Smiles Kites is in the same shopping center as Northern Lights, and they sell an impressive selection of board games – they had Trio, Castles of Burgundy, Scout, Carcassonne, and more beyond the games you’d find at Target. We ended up buying a kite … and, most fittingly, they also had the real-time game Kites in stock. They do ship games, too, so if you wanted to pick up Trio from a friendly local game shop, it’s here.

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→ July 15, 2023
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Seattle eats.

I hadn’t been to Seattle in 22 years before this past weekend, and it was 25 years since I lived there for a summer. Other than a swing through Pike Place Market, I didn’t hit any old haunts like Caffe Ladro or Gelatiamo or Zeke’s Pizza on this trip, between wanting to try new places, skipping a rental car, and staying in a hotel near the convention center that wasn’t near where I lived in 1998 (the northern side of Queen Anne).

I didn’t plan to do a brief pizza tour of Seattle, but that’s how things worked out. The first stop was Delancey, a wood-fired pizzeria in Essex that does an especially thin crust, more so than traditional Neapolitan pizzas have. I had the crimini, a white pizza with that type of mushroom, thyme, fresh mozzarella, and olive oil. The flavors were spot on – I happen to love mushrooms with thyme in any dish or form – but unfortunately the pizza was slightly overcooked, and I say that as someone who likes a little char on the edges of any pizza cooked at these temperatures. They do make an excellent Manhattan, though.

The next night, I went to Café Lago on Capitol Hill because they’re renowned for handmade pastas … but on Mondays it’s $10 for their wood-fired pizzas, and who am I to argue with that? I ordered a half portion of their Caesar salad, which was solid-average, and then the salsiccia pizza, with sausage, red peppers, fontina, and mozzarella. The cuisine here is Tuscan, so the pizza isn’t Neapolitan but it’s similar, just with less dough around the edges, and the dough was about as light as I’ve ever had – I can’t believe I ate the whole thing, but I did, because the dough felt so light and the ratio of toppings to dough was perfect. The sausage was the predominant flavor on the pizza, in a good way; it wasn’t excessively salty or flavored with fennel, which I find can overwhelm a pizza. Delancey’s style is closer to my personal favorite, but Café Lago’s pizza was better. (I also had the interesting experience of hearing the song that’s been my ring tone for at least 15 years now, “Love Spreads” by the Stone Roses, on the sound system in the restaurant – the bartender told me he makes his own playlists for when he’s on duty – which led to some serious cognitive confusion.)

I could walk from the hotel to the Taylor Shellfish Oyster Bar on Capitol Hill in less than ten minutes, so I had lunch there to take a break from writing on Monday, ordering their shrimp roll and three (raw) oysters, which I asked the server to choose for me because I don’t know a damn thing about oysters. They were much larger than what I’m used to as an east coaster and the server did a hell of a job, giving me three different flavor profiles from briny to sweet. The shrimp roll has local bay shrimp, celery, shallots, pickled Fresno chiles, tossed in a light herb aioli and served on a brioche bun. The bun was the best part, which is no knock on the filling, but my god, I could eat that bread every day until I die and be happy. Shrimp salad is so hit or miss, mostly miss in my experience, but in this case the dressing was so light that I could still taste the shrimp and the chiles.

Taurus Ox also shows up on best-of lists and was another reader recommendation. It’s a Laotian restaurant with a small but fascinating menu – they’re apparently known for their burger, among other things – and I went with what seemed like a traditional choice, the Laotian pork sausage with sticky rice, chilled vegetables and jaew bong. I could tell this was expertly made and included very high-quality ingredients … but I didn’t like any of it. The predominant flavor was capsaicin, not just for its spice but for its strongly bitter flavor, couple with the bitter heat of galangal, so all I got was bitter and hot. The texture of the sausage was fantastic, but it was hard to enjoy it with all the bitter notes. I think this just wasn’t for me.

Oriental Mart is a stand in Pike Place Market, across the street from the main hall, and you can order food at the front (street-side) to eat at one of the handful of stools in the back. They only offer a handful of dishes but you can watch the chef, Ate Lila, making them if you sit in the right spot. I split my order between salmon sinigang and chicken adobo, and my only complaint was that I wanted more of both. The chicken was fall-off-the-bone tender with the deep gingery flavor of the braising liquid, while the salmon was perfectly medium when I got it, although sitting in the hot liquid of the soup it was probably going to end up overcooked if I hadn’t eaten it quickly. The broth itself was only a little tangy – I don’t know Filipino cuisine well, but I know sinigang is supposed to be sour – and I wished there were a few more vegetables in it. Okay, that’s a modest complaint.

Portage Bay Café is kind of the Seattle version of the southwest chain Snooze; they do oversized breakfast plates and big combinations. I had the mushroom benedict, which had some very fresh and maybe undercooked mushrooms, while the breakfast potatoes were well-cooked but way too salty.

Hello Robin is a cookie shop on Capitol Hill that also sells Molly Moon’s ice cream and, if you are a little bit creatively inclined, you can get them … together. I did the “open-faced” version, because I am but one small man with a tiny stomach, getting one chocolate chip cookie with “melted chocolate” ice cream, the latter of which reminded me a ton of Toscanini’s Belgian chocolate ice cream from my Massachusetts days. The cookie was really outstanding even though I probably would call it overcooked, given how browned the edges were, but it was bursting with brown sugar and butter flavor. This was my post-Taurus Ox dessert and it made up for it.

Frankie & Jo’s, right next door to Delancey, does vegan ice creams, and some of the flavors are, to be kind, batshit. Not in the sense of containing batshit, but nobody needs chaga mushrooms or maca root in their frozen non-dairy dessert product. However, if you navigate the menu carefully, there are some more sensible flavor combinations. I went with mint brownie, because I’m not a savage; it’s peppermint ice cream with dark chocolate brownie pieces and cacao nibs. They use a coconut milk base, and the texture is as good as I’ve ever had in non-dairy ice cream. There was no point where I wished I was eating the real thing, which is impressive because I love real ice cream from cow’s milk, with all the butterfat and, unfortunately, the lactose. After eating an entire pizza at Delancey, this was the dessert I needed.

I tried two coffee spots while in Seattle, both fairly old school, Victrola and Espresso Vivace. Victrola was the easier walk, so I went there twice and came home with a bag of Rwandan beans from there. They don’t do pour-over but seem to always have a single-origin on drip, as well as the usual array of espresso drinks. Vivace runs like a machine, with two lines and a barista dedicated to each, and their espresso struck a perfect balance of acidity and natural sweetness.

Finally, two people recommended Stateside, which I walked by a half-dozen times … but they’re only open Wednesday through Saturday, so I wasn’t able to try it. They do upscale Vietnamese-influenced food and I’m sorry I missed them and their partner cocktail bar Foreign National.

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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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→ March 20, 2013
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Santa Monica and Houston eats.

This week’s episode of the Behind the Dish podcast is up, as is my piece for Insiders on potential breakout candidates for 2013.

My nationwide pizza crawl continued at Stella Rosa in Santa Monica on Tuesday night, convenient since I’d just seen Dominic Smith play around the corner at Santa Monica High School. Stella Rosa is also on that Food and Wine list of the best pizzerias in the U.S., but I thought it was just kind of average overall, a little better than the Arizona chain Grimaldi’s (related to but not owned by the same folks who run the original in Brooklyn) but not close to the others on the list I’ve tried. Stella Rosa makes the sausage for their sausage pizza in-house and they dust the pizza with fennel pollen, all of which is great, but the pizza was overtopped so that it was swimming in water – not just wet in the center, Neapolitan-style, but just watery overall, and with mozzarella that was so moisture-reduced already it became a little tough in the cooking. Their dough is more New York-style than ultra-thin Italian-style, crunchy underneath like the exterior of a baguette instead of like a cracker. They have an interesting menu of salads, so it might be a better experience with a crowd, and the attached marketplace (called “M”) offers some enormous cookies, including a chocolate chip cookie with dark chunks of chocolate and fleur de sel sprinkled on top that I may or may not have just inhaled.

I also neglected to mention the one meal I ate in Houston last week, at Bryan Caswell’s very highly regarded seafood restaurant Reef. Caswell was a guest judge on one episode of Top Chef: Texas, competed on the Next Iron Chef, and won a Food and Wine Best New Chef award … but Reef was really disappointing start to finish. The snapper in the snapper carpaccio was sliced too thickly and was very tough in parts, without enough of the tangy grapefruit agrodolce to go around. The redfish in that entree was very high-quality, but way too mildly flavored and in desperate need of a hit of acid. (Aren’t we all, though?) Even the dessert, a key lime tart with toasted meringue and fresh raspberries, was overdone – the meringue was smeared on the plate and then browned, so eating it with the tart, which is kind of the entire point of having it on the plate, was extremely difficult. I had been looking forward to this meal for a while, but every step of it was a letdown.

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→ June 22, 2010
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Saint Kitts.

As most of you know by now, I was completely off the grid last week for a family vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, half of a two-island nation (Saint Kitts and Nevis, formerly Saint Christopher and Nevis) in the Leeward Islands, a little bit east of Puerto Rico. My wife and I settled on St. Kitts for a few reasons, one of which was the presence of a Marriott where I could utilize all these points I’ve racked up, and another was the fact that we didn’t know anyone who’d been. I’d read previously that the island had been making a strong effort to cultivate high-end tourism as its main economic activity, since the sugar cane industry had died owing to high labor costs (the canes have to be harvested by hand) and the United States’ absurd sugar quotas, which prop up a dying domestic sugar industry in Florida, support our nation’s addiction to high fructose corn syrup, and really stick it to various allies of ours in the sugar business, including Australia. But I digress. We had fun and ate well, but it’s more of a rest-and-relax destination than a place for serious sightseeing.

We spent most of our time at the resort itself, largely a function of our daughter’s primary interest, going in the resort’s pools. The St. Kitts Marriott is adjacent to a beach – all beaches in St. Kitts are public so it would be inaccurate to say the hotel has a beach – but it’s on the Atlantic side of the island, with somewhat rougher waters and zero scenic value. The pools are perfect for kids; the two we used go no deeper than four feet, including the one with the swim-up bar. The staff were over-the-top friendly, and the service everywhere in the hotel was top-notch, although my wife and I noticed that each new staff member we met began with a slight standoffishness that disappeared after a few moments of chatter. When I asked one of the waitresses we knew particularly well if that had something to do with Americans being rude*, she confirmed it, off the record of course.

*Seriously. I don’t know if Americans – and we saw at least two such incidents ourselves – treat the staff there rudely because the staff members are not Americans, or because they speak with accents, or, most likely, because they are black, but if you’re one of those Americans, do me a favor and stay home, so I can stop pretending I’m Canadian every time I leave the damn country. The waitresses and porters and valets are service workers, but that does not entitle you to treat them like they’re the help.

There were a few hiccups at the hotel when we got there, as they “upgraded” us to a room that turned out to lack air conditioning (we were told, after three calls to the front desk finally produced a staff member at our door, that the “chiller” was broken), but they did fall all over themselves to make it right. I also think it’s weird that the towel hut by the pools closes at 6:30 pm – if you don’t return the towels by then they charge you $25 – when the pools are open till 11 and guests might want to take towels to an off-site beach.

And we did, as we found a superior beach within walking distance of the hotel (or a $6 cab ride away) at Frigate Bay, home also of a row of restaurant-bars known as the Strip. Frigate Bay Beach sits on the Caribbean side, and despite the lack of a visible row of rocks to break some of the waves, it was significantly calmer than the beach next to the Marriott, and my daughter was thrilled at the number and variety of seashells there. We ate at one of the restaurants on the Strip, Mr. X’s Shiggidy Shack, but I’ll save that for the food portion of the post.

The third beach we visited was a haul from the hotel, a $22 cab ride that took at least 20 minutes, but it was the most beautiful by far: Cockleshell Bay Beach, on the southern tip of the island of St. Kitts, only about two miles from Nevis. The sand was the cleanest, the scenery the most lush, and the view of Nevis is tremendous, with the latter’s central volcano practically throwing its shadow on you. And, true to its name, it had many shells, mostly cockles.

Our one other expedition outside the hotel was to “the city,” Basseterre, the nation’s capital and the only significant population center on the island. It was disappointing, although I think that is in part because we compared it to Hamilton, Bermuda, the only other island town we’ve ever visited; Hamilton is (or at least was in 2005) clean, bright, and busy, with wide streets and plenty of places to eat and shop. Basseterre has a shlock district called Port Zante that is new, bright, and full of stores selling crappy trinkets, cheap liquor (not that there’s anything wrong with that), jewelry, or other duty-free items for tourists on cruise ships, who generally do little to help the economies of the islands they visit. From there, we crossed into the Circus area, where we found a few local shops but not much in the way of restaurants or other establishments to keep us in town. The streets are narrow and many of the buildings outside of Port Zante were run down. I’m well aware that the town is there for its residents and not its tourists, but I saw a lost opportunity there for an island that is trying to cultivate a niche in high-end tourism.

You can do some nature tours within Saint Kitts or Nevis, both of which have rain forests around their central volcanoes (Saint Kitts’ peak is extinct, while Nevis’ has been dormant for millennia), but even without my daughter there I’m not sure I would have suggested that sort of activity. It was way too hot.

The airport merits mention because it’s so hilariously small. There are four “gates,” which are just doors a few feet apart in the same wall of the lone departure lounge, and all exit to the same piece of asphalt. The tower is actually across the runway in an adjacent field. There is no restaurant, just a tiny bar that serves prefab sandwiches and three trinket shops before security. The duty free stores after security did offer excellent prices on liquor, cheaper than anything I saw elsewhere. I’ll get to the liquor in a second.

My main complaint about St. Kitts aside from the absence of a nice town is the expense of getting around the island. Getting from the hotel to town was $12 without tip each way, for a trip of about ten minutes. It’s not an exorbitant fare, but suddenly it’s $30 round-trip to get to Basseterre, $50 round-trip to get to Cockleshell Bay (and a good restaurant there), $15 each way from the airport, and it adds up. I’d rather spend my money on food or local goods than on getting around, but there’s no alternative, and we spent more time in the hotel as a result. We also skipped Nevis, partly for cost reasons (it would have been $80-100 round-trip just to get there), but mostly because we didn’t think my daughter would be up for the roughly 90 minutes it would have taken each way to get from our hotel to the Botanical Gardens, the one site on Nevis we thought might hold her interest. At the end of the day, she was happy in the pool.

Last stop before I run through the restaurants: St. Kitts does have three local rum producers, and I brought home one bottle of Belmont Estates’ gold rum. It’s unaged, which means it has a harsher taste than any of my preferred rums from around the region (Appleton and Cruzan are my favorites at the moment), and the bars at the Marriott didn’t offer it. They did offer Brinley rums, five varieties of flavored rums blended on the island but (I believe) distilled elsewhere, and anyway flavored rums are for sissies so I never bothered. The third kind is CSR, short for Cane Spirit Rothschild, distilled from sugar cane rather than from molasses, and like that style of spirit it’s more for sipping than for mixing. The duty free stores I found usually had a few options from around the region, including Appleton, Cruzan, Bacardi (a waste of good molasses, in my opinion), Myers, and Mount Gay, as did the bars at the Marriott*.

*Rum and ginger ale was my drink of choice during the week, with either Myers dark or Appleton gold, but I did order two other drinks. One was a guava daiquiri, mostly because I love guava anything, but the resulting drink tasted mostly of … guava, with the rum well buried in the background. The other was planter’s punch, which I thought was always based on a fairly standard formula, but the Marriott’s version had Bacardi, Myers dark, a liqueur I didn’t catch, and a splash of juice. If I had gone in St. Kitts to forget something, it would have been the perfect drink.

Now, the food, starting with the options in the hotel. Cafe Calypso serves breakfast and lunch, and the breakfast buffet is pricey ($21-25) but excellent. There’s section of local breakfast items, with one rotating protein dish (fried tilapia, a stew with salt cod, pork stew, some kind of spicy chicken) alongside fried plantains, cinnamon-tinged jonnycakes, grilled vegetables, and crepes with what I assume was a house-made three-berry compote that was incredible – my daughter and I inhaled the stuff. They also have the standard assortment of American foods, and a strong array of pastries which were definitely made in-house (we talked to the pastry chef). The only miss was the horrible tea selection: I’m in a former British colony and you’re offering me … Bigelow?

The lunch menu isn’t long, but it’s diverse, including a turkey BLT with a fried egg as one of the layers, a Caesar wrap with fried fish (tasted great, but the heat from the fish made the dressing run), a chicken roti (traditional local fare, with curried chicken wrapped in a lavash-like bread, but the filling had zero salt and thus near zero taste), chimichurri skirt steak with mashed potatoes (the steak was a little undermarinated but they had the righ idea), and, my favorite item, ribs with a guava BBQ sauce (extremely tender with a sweet-and-sour sauce that would go on just about any meat – I’d love that with duck). The chefs all over the hotel are accommodating if you have an off-menu request, and they made grilled cheese for my (vegetarian) daughter that was actually grilled, with grill marks; I don’t think she failed to finish any of the ones she had at the Calypso.

Outside the restaurant is the actual cafe, with a full assortment of espresso-based drinks, although their espresso-making skills are a little lacking; twice I saw the barista put the grounds in the portafilter without tamping them down, which is a good way to make brown water if that’s what you’re going for. They have a pastry case with cookies, muffins, and, for $4, desserts like slices of opera cake or Black Forest Cake, or individiual tiramisu portions that were big enough for my wife and I to split. We ate well in the hotel all week, but the pastry chef gets the gold star for the tiramisu and for the donuts, also made in-house and likely the best I have ever tasted.

It is also worth mentioning that the staff at the Calypso were outstanding and took the time to learn our names, greeted our daughter every morning (even waitresses who weren’t working our section would come over to say hi), and memorize our drink orders. They don’t have to do any of that, and I would never expect it, but it added a lot to our stay. And they did this knowing full well that we came from the U.S. In fact, we found everyone we met on the island to be friendly once we proved we wouldn’t bite, and many locals thanked us for choosing to take our vacation on St. Kitts.

Still in the Marriott, there’s a very strong Italian restaurant called La Cucina that has an antipasto bar that I’d call a can’t-miss, including real prosciutto, marinated artichokes, roasted peppers (three colors!), and a giant block of Parmiggiano-Reggiano from which you can carve your own slices or chunks. The entrees I had were both just short of great. The risotto with wild mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes had huge mushroom flavor, including morels (that is, an actual wild mushroom, as opposed to places that say “wild mushroom” and give you creminis), but they used a strain of rice I haven’t seen in risotto before, and it didn’t produce the right creamy texture I’d expect in that dish. The ravioli in butter were just that: House-made ravioli served in melted butter, not fried briefly in butter to get some color on the pasta, then served in brown butter. It was fine, and my daughter might not have tried them if they’d been browned, but nothing that an average home cook couldn’t produce. My wife had the pasta alla bolognese twice, getting a generous portion of pasta and meat with a sauce that featured strong, fresh flavors of all the vegetables it contained (carrots, onions, and celery, at the very least).

We ate one other meal at Blu, a seafood restaurant at the Marriott with an impressive array of fish options, although the best thing I had there was the mashed potatoes with truffle oil, sweet, ridiculously creamy, but with the irregular texture of “smashed” potatoes, a nice contrast to the largely soft potato-crusted grouper I had as my main course. The house salad has a pomegranate vinaigrette that wasn’t cloyingly sweet like berry vinaigrettes usually are, and the greens looked like they’d just been picked*. The chocolate-and-peanut-butter mousse tart could have been a little darker, but was otherwise excellent. My wife went with the pork chop – she doesn’t care for fish – and said it was good but so thick that it started to dry out on the edges.

*That was actually a trend all week: Unbelievable salad greens. Brighter colors, crisper leaves, fresher flavors. Maybe that’s their niche within their niche: Come for the beaches, stay for the produce.

Moving off site … Mr. X’s Shiggedy Shack is, in fact, a shack on Frigate Bay Beach, covered but open, with a limited menu that ranges from $30 grilled lobster to $5 burgers. Every local we talked to said that was the one place to eat outside the Marriott, and our favorite waitress at the Marriott told me to get the mahi-mahi, which was incredibly fresh and clean and perfectly grilled, one of the two best pieces of fish I had in a week where I ate a lot of fish. The sides mostly just took up space. Their house rum punch, the Shiggedy Jig, wasn’t very strong and had a liqueur I couldn’t place (Amaretto?) but that dominated the drink. In a rum punch, I should taste the rum, right?

PJ’s is an “authentic” Italian place on the same road as the Marriott and is awful. Imagine if a lifelong resident of St. Kitts had never visited Italy or eaten Italian food but got an old Italian cookbook and decided to open an Italian restaurant. That’s PJ’s.

The Spice Mill has been open on Cockleshell Bay Beach for about a year and a half and had the most innovative menu we found anywhere on the island. My wife had a pulled pork sandwich that she said was outstanding aside from the huge smear of mayonnaise on the bun, which wasn’t advertised on the menu and was about three times as much as a sandwich really needs (besides, pulled pork doesn’t really scream for mayo). I took the server’s advice and went with the Greek salad with mahi-mahi; the fish was the best piece of fish I had all week, immaculately cooked, and the salad was bright and fresh with some mixed greens and diced mango … but feta and mahi-mahi just don’t go together. If they took the cheese out and just called it a mixed salad with mahi-mahi, it would be worth the $50 round-trip cab fare alone.

And that brings me to my last point: For some reason, you need to jump up and down or light your table on fire to get a check at any restaurant in St. Kitts other than Calypso. It took a minimum of 15 minutes from when I asked for the check to when I had a copy of something to sign at La Cucina, the Spice Mill, and Mr. X’s, although the Shack at least deserves credit for owning up to the fact that their register was on the fritz and having the server come to the table and add up the bill for us on a calculator. I’ve heard about people moving on “island time,” but when a customer asks for the check, the restaurant’s goal should be to give it to him and clear the table ASAP.

Would we go to St. Kitts again? Maybe, but I feel like it’s a place worth seeing once rather than twice. There isn’t enough on the island for a young child to do beyond the beaches, and while I like museums that’s not what I’m going for when I head to an island where it’s 90 degrees every day. Once I rack up enough miles to for another island trip, we’re probably headed for someplace new, since St. Kitts didn’t have the same appeal as Bermuda did once upon a time (the decline of Bermuda is another post entirely) and we’d like to experience and see something else. If you’re looking at trying St. Kitts for the first time, though, it’s pretty enough and the Marriott would be an excellent choice for the stay for its staff, its food options, and for its proximity to Frigate Bay Beach, and I can guarantee you that your visit will be appreciated.

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→ July 21, 2008
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Maple-Ancho Glazed Salmon.

Back in April, I hit Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill and loved the Honey-Ancho Chile Glazed Salmon. I wanted to reproduce the dish at home while making it at least partly “my own,” so I decided to make a few enhancements.

Maple Ancho-Glazed Salmon

1/3 cup pure maple syrup (darker is better)
1 Tbsp ancho chile powder
1 Tbsp dijon mustard
1/2 tsp smoked Spanish paprika
2 lbs salmon, cut into four 8-ounce fillets

1. Preheat your grill for direct grilling. If you’re cooking indoors, preheat your oven to 350 degrees and set a heavy, oven-proof saute pan or skillet over medium-high heat.
2. Season the salmon with salt and pepper.
3. To grill: Place the salmon over the coals/flame, seasoned side down, and cook until a nut-brown crust has formed, four to five minutes depending on your heat level. Turn the fish and baste the cooked side with the maple syrup mixture. Cook with the skin side down until cooked through to your desired level, three minutes for medium, five for well done.
To cook indoors: In about 1 Tbsp of vegetable or olive oil, sear the seasoned side for two and a half minutes. Flip and cook the skin side for two minutes. Baste and place in the oven until cooked to the desired level of doneness, around three minutes for medium and around six minutes for well done.

Also, if you decide to make his side sauces, you can cheat on the black bean sauce and use canned black beans, simmering them for about fifteen minutes with the aromatics. I’ve made the jalapeño crema by placing heavy cream and the roasted, seeded pepper in a cup and whizzing them with my stick blender. The blade’s action will partially whip the cream, creating a crème fraîche-like consistency for a significantly lower price.

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→ July 19, 2008
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New York eats.

Two dinner hits from the recent trip to NYC.

First up was Avra, a Greek seafood restaurant in midtown. Their specialty is whole fish, grill-roasted over charcoal, deboned, and butterflied, dressed simply with a little olive oil, some large capers, and parsley. What it wasn’t dressed with was salt, which is criminal. You pay by the pound, so it’s not a great deal for one person since they don’t seem to sell anything under a pound, and a pound of whole fish is a lot for one person to eat. I went with the server’s suggestion, lavraki, a relatively tasteless white fish with a texture like that of branzino (sea bream). For a starter, I went with a salad of goat cheese, red onions, and arugula with a balsamic vinegar dressing, which was a little odd because I don’t associate balsamic vinegar with Greece at all. The goat cheese came spread on two small crostini and had nothing to do with the underdressed pile of arugula at the center of the plate. In fact, the only real positive of the meal was the fresh, crusty peasant bread and the thin hummus and delicious brined olives. I hate olives – one of the only foods I genuinely do not like, along with most kinds of ham, eggplant, and corned beef – but the brown olives (cultivar unknown, unfortunately) were out of this world.

The following night’s meal was better, at Sushiden, a rather hopping sushi place also in Midtown. It’s places like Sushiden that remind me of how rare it is to find fresh, high-quality sushi, because the flavor and texture of their fish demolishes anything I’ve had outside of New York and California. You pay for the quality, though – prices started at about $3.50 per piece for nigiri and went well north of $10. I stuck mostly to less expensive fish, like the incredibly tender salmon (sake), but stepped out a little for one piece of the daily special Japanese grouper ($10) and the fatty bigeye tuna ($8). The only fish that wasn’t out of this world was the freshwater eel (unagi), which was tough and fishy. I was also impressed that the meal finishes with a cup of hojicha, a green tea where the leaves are roasted, leaving an incredibly smooth beverage without the heavy grassy notes of good green teas. The only negative of Sushiden is that it’s hard to see getting out of there for under $75 a person without even including alcohol. One additional positive was that the clientele was overwhelmingly Japanese.

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