→ October 21, 2021
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Arizona eats, 2021 edition.

Last week marked my first trip to Arizona in two years, since my last run through the Fall League, which also marks the longest I’d gone between visits to that state since my first trip there as an ESPN employee back in 2006. As such, I had some old favorites I had to visit – the Hillside Spot, Matt’s Big Breakfast, Crêpe Bar, Cartel Coffee (three times, including the airport location), Grimaldi’s (to taunt my daughter, who loves that place), and, for books, Changing Hands. That didn’t leave a ton of opportunity to try new places, but I did manage to work in four new spots.

Tacos Calafia has five locations in the Valley, two of which are close to ballparks – Peoria (on Thunderbird, one long block south of the stadium) and, most importantly, Surprise, a relative wasteland when it comes to non-chain food, with only Saigon Kitchen to really speak for the area. Tacos Calafia offers a very short menu of “Tijuana-style” tacos, with four or five meats, a small salsa bar, and a few other dishes like quesadillas, nachos, and vampiros that are based around the same meats. I tried the al pastor (pork) and pollo (chicken), and would agree with the assessment of my friend Bill Mitchell, who recommended the place, that the meats are plus, and the reason to go there. The toppings are nothing special – I’m really not into guacamole that is blended until completely smooth, but that’s personal preference – so you’ve got to go for the meats. Three tacos will run you $9-10, and I didn’t need anything more than that.

Speaking of Peoria, which isn’t all that much better for non-chain food than Surprise, on a whim I decided to see if there was a good Thai place nearby. Sala Thai had unusually positive reviews and comments online, and I think they’re well justified (based on one meal of one dish, so SSS applies). Pad see ew is my go-to dish at new Thai places because it’s usually not too sweet, like pad Thai can be, and there’s plenty of variety around the dish so a restaurant can make it their own, so to speak. Sala Thai’s was damn good, savory and barely sweet, with a lot of broccoli and some caramelization on the noodles themselves, which reminded me of the wok hei you get at Chinese restaurants. I actually wasn’t that hungry for this meal, but ate because I knew waiting till after the game was a bad idea, and yet I devoured this.

Over in downtown Mesa, Que Chevere is a food truck gone brick-and-mortar, serving Venezuelan staples – empanadas, arepas, cachapas, and more. Mindful of my inability to eat anything in the car without making a mess, I chose the empanadas con pollo, and my god am I glad I did. I love just about all empanadas; it’s a giant dumpling that’s baked or fried, so what’s not to love? Que Chevere’s empanada dough differs from those I’ve had before. It must have had cornmeal in it, because it tasted like a hush puppy (a fried ball of cornmeal-based dough) with shredded chicken in it. The chicken itself was a little dry, since it’s white meat, but the cilantro-lime dipping sauce took care of that (and I didn’t drip any on my shirt).

I went to Pa’ La’s original location maybe two years ago to try their vaunted grain bowls, a type of dish I don’t generally enjoy, and was kind of blown away by it. Claudio Urciuoli has now expanded to a new, larger location, helmed by one of his protégés, on Washington Street in downtown Phoenix. The new spot has a more complete menu that is mostly centered around small plates, heavy on the fish. The plates are small, but the seafood is superb, with incredibly delicate yellowtail in the special crudo dish I tried. A local review had raved about the shrimp, but I found them underseasoned and kind of tasteless, although they were certainly of high quality. The pickled white anchovies (boquerones) were briny, oily, garlicky, and bright, although they needed bread, not the fennel crackers that came with them and proved unable to soak up any of the deliciousness left on the plate. For dessert, I went with the frozen chocolate mousse with miso bananas, which hit the palate like ice cream with an umami boost from the miso. Their menu changes constantly, and I’d like to see what it looks like on another day – or to go with a crowd so I could try more things. But what they really need is more bread, as that’s Urciuoli’s specialty, and it was mostly absent from the menu.

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→ July 23, 2014
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Minneapolis eats, 2014 edition.

Today’s Klawchat came a day earlier than normal to accommodate my travel schedule. I’ve already filed my Soria trade reaction post.

I didn’t get to try nearly as many places as I wanted to hit in Minneapolis, since I had the family in tow and was a little limited by actual work. We also all overate so much at Tilia, in Linden Hills, for lunch on Monday that no one wanted an actual dinner that night.

Tilia’s menu changes often and features more small plates than entrees, so, with a group of four adults and four kids, we went mostly for the former. The first start was the braised pork belly, finished with a sweet glaze and I assume roasted at high temperature to brown the exterior; that’s just so not good for you but one of the greatest pleasures of the meet world thanks to the texture of pork belly fat. The roasted Brussels sprouts were the other star, featuring “ham” (not just ordinary country ham though – some sort of dry-cured variety instead) and walnuts as well as a very lightly applied sweet/tangy balsamic glaze. The grilled chicken thighs came with diced chorizo, pickled pineapple, & black bean-Oaxaca cheese fondue; I actually would have been happy with a plate just of the accompaniements, like a bowl of that chorizo served over a little rice, as the chicken was well-prepared but a bit light on the seasoning. The grilled shrimp plate came with fresh English peas, grilled scallions, and a “spicy” (highly flavored, but not hot) sauce, but the general sense around the table was that it was just okay.

The flat bread starter with olive oil and dukkah (an Egyptian spice blend that often includes seeds and nuts, here with slivered almonds) is a must, and the French fries with a mayo/ketchup style fry sauce were a big hit with the kids. I didn’t try the fish taco torta, but the friend who tried it raved, and it looked ridiculous with an enormous piece of fried fish (I think the server said mahi-mahi, although that’s not frequently deep-fried) on a telera-style roll. The only miss was the “chicken liver BLT,” mostly because the bread had an off taste to it, like it was made with too-sour buttermilk or sour cream, but also because there was no bacon involved, despite the name. The server, whom I might have mentioned looked quite a bit like Anna Friel (this is a good thing), ended up taking the charge off the bill even though I didn’t ask her to do so.

A reader of mine invited me last year to visit Saffron, where he worked in the kitchen at the time, so that was my first stop on this trip. Saffron offers eastern Mediterranean food, mostly straight-up, including some of the chef’s family recipes – like the slow-cooked green beans with tomatoes, good enough that we ordered a second dish of them to pair with the hummus and warm pitas (that was our server’s suggestion). I think the fried cauliflower was the best of the mezze (small plates) we ordered, with a thin crispy coating along with a moderately spicy harissa mixture and a thick sheep’s milk fondue for dipping. The grilled octopus a la plancha was my least favorite starter, but then again I’m not sure I’ve ever had an octopus dish I really loved because the meat is always tough, the result of cooking something with a very high protein content but little fat. The grilled kofta meatballs with a spicy tomato sauce were the hottest thing we ordered, so the kids didn’t enjoy them but the adults inhaled them; they’re denser than Italian meatballs (at least good ones), but the salt and spice were perfect with alcohol, such as the house negroni I ordered.

Two of the three larger plates we ordered were huge hits. The gnocchi were spectacular, pan-seared, soft and light inside, served with a panoply of herbs and spring/summer vegetables. The roast chicken was among the best I’ve ever had, perfectly crisped but incredibly moist and juicy on the inside, pulled from the oven at just the right moment. The chicken comes with a giant lavash wrapped around steaming-hot roasted vegetables, which were well-cooked but underseasoned. However, the chicken “bisteeya” was a little too odd for me – an aromatic saffron-stewed chicken & almond pie, wrapped in a phyllo pastry and dusted with cinnamon sugar. I don’t mind savory applications of cinnamon at all, but the overt presence of the sugar turned my palate to dessert mode, after which it’s not so receptive to meat. We didn’t have room for dessert, as with Tilia.

At Target Field, I only had time for a quick stop at the Butcher & Boar stand for the BBQ rib tips, which were delicious, with a sweet/smoky sauce and good tooth to the meat, as well as very, very messy. It wasn’t really a full meal – I love meat, but generally in concert with something not-meat at the same time, perhaps a plant of some sort – but I wouldn’t be able to walk past that stand again without stopping for another serving.

While we did one breakfast at Hell’s Kitchen, because I love their cornmeal waffles and our friends in town (and their kids) like the lemon ricotta pancakes, we had breakfast two other mornings at Blackbird, a very cute corner coffee shop with a lot of local ingredients across the menu. I ended up getting the same thing twice because it was so good – their norske scrambler, with house-smoked salmon and crème fraiche, alongside these almost-perfect hash browns (really crispy exterior, soft interior, just a little bit greasy) and toast made from Patisserie 46 breads. I tried the sweet potato biscuit, which, shockingly, tasted like a sweet potato in biscuit form – a good idea but too dense for me. They brew coffee from local small-batch roasters B&W, with bagged high-end teas from Tea Forte, both good options for your caffeine intake.

Finally, I managed to try an espresso from Dogwood Coffee Company, which appears to be the best artisan roaster in the Twin Cities, with a late-night run to Urban Bean Coffee at Lyndale and west 24th street. It’s small and simple, just expertly prepared coffees, and Dogwood’s Neon espresso beans (a blend of Colombian and Brazilian coffees) produce a shot with great body and sweet-tart berry notes.

Readers offered many, many suggestions of other places to try that I just didn’t have the time or opportunity to reach. Chris Crawford checked out the Bachelor Farmer and raved about it. Travail was closed that week. I didn’t make the Butcher & Boar, Brasa, 112 Eatery, Bar La Grassa, Sparks, or Coup d’Etat. We stopped by George & the Dragon again (hi, Fred!) for beer and a few small plates in lieu of dinner a few hours after the Tilia extravaganza, and one of these trips I’ll have a proper meal there. I do appreciate all the recommendations you offered. Now I just need the Gophers to bust out a junior lefty throwing 95 next year.

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→ April 19, 2013
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Atlanta, Lexington, Charleston, Durham eats.

My updated ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up now for Insiders.

I returned to Richard Blais’ The Spence on my second run through Atlanta – this time I paid – and happened to hit them on the first day of a new menu, with a handful of new highlights. I ordered a salt cod and potato dish that took the standard bacalao formula and instead whipped the salt cod into the potatoes, mellowing their flavor (I like it, but it is on the fishy end of the spectrum). The pork terrine is still on the menu, but the jam served with it seems to change weekly – my week had celery and rhubarb in it and was superb, sweet and tangy to balance the mustard/salty flavor of the terrine. The pasta contained porcini in the dough as well as in the dish, not as good as the English-pea cavatappi (which was unreal) but strong in its own right, with that earthy, almost meaty flavor coming through in each bite. For dessert, the chocolate-peanut dish with roasted banana ice cream was weird in a good way – it looked like nothing, just blocks of milk chocolate with various crumbs and a small scoop of the ice cream, but if you took every element together it was like a rich, extremely luxurious adult candy bar. I also had another Sailor’s Crutch, their gin-lemon-falernum-soda concoction that is among my new favorite cocktails.

Before the game that night, I ate at Tasty China in Marietta, apparently another outpost of the infamous DC-area chef Peter Chang, who specializes in Szechuan cuisine and has a habit of disappearing from the scene for months at a time. I tried his place in Charlottesville two years ago and was blown away, figuratively but also literally by the spice level of his food. Tasty China, on the other hand, was a little bit of a disappointment, even though I asked the server for a recommendation. I ended up with a tea-smoked crispy duck, half a duck to be specific, that tasted great but was on the dry side, since it came with no sauce or other flavoring besides the smoke. The food there may be amazing and authentic but I didn’t get that experience.

Moving up the coast to South Carolina, I took a recommendation from J.C. Bradbury to try Shealy’s BBQ in Leesville, right next to Lexington where I was seeing Nick Ciuffo. The Q itself was nothing special – their pulled pork is shredded and served in sauce – but the fried chicken was something else. The food is served buffet-style, one price, all you can eat, and while I do not look kindly on all-you-can-eat places, the fried chicken was worth the whole experience, even the relatively boring sides that weren’t all that hot. Just go and get some chicken and cornbread and everything else will work itself out.

In Charleston, I ended up returning to Husk, but this time at at the Bar at Husk, in the carriage house next door. The menu there only has a few small items, but one is their well-reviewed burger, which might be the best burger I’ve ever had, even though it’s served very simply, with just a few toppings. It’s apparently chef Sean Brock’s ode to In-n-Out, with two fairly thin patties, but comprising brisket, chuck, and hickory-smoked bacon ground together. (That article says it’s 100% chuck now, but the bartender who took my order said it includes brisket.) I omitted the American cheese, because no matter what Sean Brock says that stuff is nasty. I left the rest alone – white onion, pickles, and Brock’s sauce, which includes mayo, ketchup, and mustard, all served on a squishy brioche-like bun. It’s a thing of beauty.

My next trip took me to North Carolina, with three new spots as well as a few old favorites. I spent a night in Hickory, where local eats are somewhat limited, but did have an adequate “jerk” chicken sandwich and local beer at the Olde Hickory Tap Room, which serves its full menu till 11 pm and a limited menu till 2 am, key if you’re there to see the Crawdads. The jerk chicken is a half-pound breast, butterflied and glazed with a sweet and slightly spicy jerk-ish sauce, served with mayo, lettuce, and tomato on a very good but too thinly-sliced sourdough bread. The Irish roasted root vegetable side is a little meager but definitely superior to the standard fries or chips. It’s a very broad menu, which isn’t always a great sign, but if you’re trying to avoid chain restaurants in Hickory it’s at least extensive enough that you’ll find something worth your time.

In Durham, I tried two new spots, including Mateo Tapas, owned by the same folks behind Vin Rouge (which has this bacon jam that is among the best things I have ever eaten anywhere … and yes, I went again this trip). Mateo’s lunch tapas menu focuses on the basics, mostly authentic items, just prepared a little more American style. For example, their boquerones (white anchovies) taste fresh and clean with olive oil and salt but are served filleted rather than whole. Their Spanish tortilla, a dish of olive-oil poached potatoes molded into a frittata-like cake with several eggs, has a thin chorizo-mayonnaise on top that gave the dish some needed spice. The gambas, shrimp cooked in garlicky olive oil, was probably the most traditionally-prepared dish I ordered, while the least was the grilled bread with three spreads – butternut-romesco, green olive, and beet, with the olive by far my favorite, while the beet was too sweet and the romesco a little plain. Given the quality of the food the prices were very reasonable, with those four plates more than a meal for me and a total of around $30 including tax and tip. Like most tapas places, though, it’s probably a better experience and value with a crowd.

I can also recommend a very new (ten days old, I believe) ice cream parlor right in downtown Durham called, appropriately enough, The Parlour. Run by the brother and sister-in-law of longtime reader and occasional dish commenter Daphne, The Parlour makes some insanely high-quality ice cream, low-overrun, very creamy, with a small number of flavors that showcase a lot of creativity. The salted butter caramel might be a little cliché, but it tasted just like real, homemade caramel sauce that you might eat with a tablespoon when your wife isn’t looking. (Not that I’ve ever done that.) The chocolate espresso stout cake was rich chocolate ice cream, not as dark as I like it but not very sweet, with bits of the cake swirled in the ice cream. I crushed two scoops and could have gone for more if I had been insane.

As for other spots in Durham, I returned to Rue Cler and Nanataco from my last trip, as well as Vin Rouge from a previous visit. I branched out a little, trying the braised beef tongue and smoked hog jowl tacos at Nanataco and a special duck confit salad at Vin Rouge, all worth having again. Vin Rouge does everything in-house, smoking their own meats and making their own bread (at another of their restaurants), while sourcing most things locally – just the kind of restaurant I love to support, as long as the food is amazing.

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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.
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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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→ April 17, 2012
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Atlanta, Macon, Greenville, & Baton Rouge eats.

The marquee meal of the trip was Top Chef All-Stars winner Richard Blais’ new “haute doggery,” HD1, located in Atlanta. I went with the Eastbound and Down dog, given its baseball theme and the presence of pulled pork as one of the toppings on the hot dog, along with sweet mustard and cole slaw, and it didn’t disappoint. As you’ve probably heard (I’ve said it enough recently), I ended a ten-year boycott of hot dogs with this meal; I gave them up because, as I told Chef Blais when he came on the podcast last month, in most cases you just don’t know what you’re eating when you get one. I’d also had too many mediocre or worse hot dogs and found that I always felt lousy after eating them, so the easy solution was to just cut them out. HD1’s hot dog was worth making the exception, bringing back a lot of (possibly constructed) memories from childhood – this is what I think a hot dog at the ballpark used to taste like, even though I know it was certainly never this good.

The pulled pork worked surprisingly well as a supporting player, bringing smoky and savory elements that made the final product more complex, so it felt more like real food as opposed to fast or junk food, while the thin layer of mustard gave the sandwich a much-needed sharpness. The waffle fries come with a sweet/spicy maple-soy dressing that defied my palate’s expectation of sweet/salty/sour (that is, ketchup); most potatoes aren’t that flavorful, so the bold sauce works really well on the blank canvas, although I ended up adding salt to mute the sweetness (I love maple syrup, but it is really sweet). The homemade pickles were actually the better of the two sides – large chunks with a subtle yet strong spicy finish. I was there just before 2 pm on a Wednesday, so the place was pretty quiet, but I like the décor and the vibe – the seating is mostly communal – and with a pretty broad menu that features various sausages (I’d like to try their Merguez, made with lamb), at least one vegetarian option, a good beer/wine selection, it seems like a good place to head with a group.

I followed several reader recommendations to hit Atlanta’s Antico Pizza, serving thin-crust, wood-fired pizzas reportedly in the tradition of Naples, itself the pizza capital of Italy (although regional variations abound). Antico’s pizzas are very good, a 55 on the 20-80 scale, a little too spongy in the crust, with high-quality toppings cut way too large for the pizza; the fennel sausage itself was fine, but balls of sausage the diameter of a half-dollar are too big for any kind of pizza, much less a thin-crust variety. That sausage is the star player on the San Gennaro pizza, along with sweet red peppers, cipolline onions, and mozzarella di bufala, a classic combination that, while tricky to eat, brought a solid balance of salty and savory flavors on a spongy dough.

They make several claims that they’re serving “authentic pizza napoletana,” and while what they offer is good, it’s not authentic. There are fairly specific guidelines on what authentic Neapolitan pizza comprises, including a thinner crust than what Antico offers (it should be 0.36-0.44 cm thick, specifically), a wetter center, smaller toppings, and usually fresh mozzarella rather than what I assume was the low-moisture mozzarella Antico used on the pizza I got. This is more a Neapolitan/New York-style hybrid, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Antico offers a very reasonable value ($21 for one pizza that was two meals’ worth of food for me) for what is at heart an artisanal product, but it’s not as good as Scottsdale’s ‘Pomo, which is actually certified as authentic (take that for what it’s worth – I may be Italian by descent, but I lack faith in any sort of Italian authority) and meets the requirements for authentic pizza napoletana. And ‘Pomo isn’t even the best pizza in the Valley.

Macon eats were generally unremarkable; the best meal was at the Bear’s Den, offering southern comfort food in a meat-and-two format, with the fried chicken at least above-average (very crispy crust, not too greasy) but the fried okra very disappointing (crust was soft, inside wasn’t evenly cooked) and the cornbread dressing somewhere in between. Breakfasts at Market Street Cafe and at Jeneane’s were both generally disappointing; Market Street Cafe did have a decent biscuit, but that’s about it. I did have a place in mind in Baxley, Georgia, where Byron Buxton plays – K&L Barbecue, where they serve the meat on a baked potato – but the game ran over three hours, by which point the restaurant was closed, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be in Baxley again.

Moving on to Greenville, SC, one of the coolest towns I’ve come across in all of my travels – in less than 24 hours I was thinking about whether I could live there, and leaning towards ‘yes’ – after leaving the gorgeous Fluor Field and hitting Main Street at around 10:15 on a Wednesday night, I was shocked to find few parking spots open, plenty of people milling about, and a number of bars and restaurants still open or just closing up. I ended up at Stellar Wine Bar, which offers a small menu of appetizers, tapas, and entrees, and what they do offer they do very well. The server was a little thrown by my open-ended request for suggestions – I told her I eat just about everything and wanted to try two smaller plates rather than one entree – but eventually gave me her five favorites, from which I chose two.

Their veal “paté” is actually a terrine of seasoned ground veal wrapped in bacon and sliced thinly, served with crisp slices of pretzel bread (termed ciabatta on the menu, but that’s not what I got on the plate), spicy whole-grain mustard, diced white onions, and cornichons. It was a tricky dish to eat – the cornichons had no intention of cooperating with my plan to get every element into one bite – but, even as someone who prefers meat dishes hot rather than cold, I was impressed by the layering of flavors and the perfect seasoning on the meat, although the presence of cold, soft bacon on the outside didn’t do much other than hold the thing together (sort of).

The diver scallops over cauliflower puree were perfectly seared, perhaps slightly overcooked in the center but not to the point of toughness, and the cauliflower puree was light and a bit creamy, giving a richness to contrast to the lean scallops. For dessert, I took the server’s suggestion of the flourless chocolate torte (over chocolate mousse or bread pudding), which was dark, rich, had a hint of cinnamon, but was a little too dense, to the point where it was hard to cut or chew.

For breakfast, Marybeth’s promised a slightly more upscale take on basic breakfast items, with my meal somewhat hit or miss. The scrambled eggs with goat cheese and basil were made to order but so massive (it had to be at least three eggs, probably four or five) that they were overcooked on the edges while soft in the center. The hash browns, however, were superb, perfectly browned on the surface, soft and fluffy inside, and not greasy in the least. Just add salt and go.

Final stop was Baton Rouge, good for one meal and one dessert. The meal was very ordinary, Sammy’s Grill on Highland (a reader rec) – the gumbo was thin and the grilled shrimp po’ boy, while made with very fresh shrimp, desperately needed some kind of seasoning. Also, they didn’t hollow out the bread, which I thought was part of the definition of a po’ boy, although I could be wrong about that. Dessert was better, at Rue Beignet, apparently the upstart in competition with Baton Rouge landmark Coffee Call; the beignets (a photo of which I posted on Twitter) were extremely light and airy inside, crispy and brown on the outside, although without the powdered sugar they didn’t have much flavor beyond that of “fried dough” – not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that. They also served the obligatory weak cafe au lait, which I would never drink anywhere except in Louisiana. One warning – Rue Beignet isn’t open as late as Coffee Call, but they did serve me even though I arrived just a few minutes before closing.

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→ August 19, 2011
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Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, & San Diego eats.

MB Post in Manhattan Beach is set in a former post office and, despite a trying-way-too-hard hipster vibe, the food is excellent. It’s a tapas bar in practice, although they use the tired “little plates” euphemism, bringing together Spanish, American, and southeast Asian influences; every dish we ordered was enough for two to share but would have been stretched for three, except for the Brussels sprouts (with hazelnuts and Emmentaler) which was roughly a week’s supply. The first winner was the warm pretzel with hot horseradish-mustard, a sinus-clearing (that’s good) dipping sauce that probably should be served at every decent burger joint in the country. The confit pork belly with Swiss chard and corn agnolotti, one of the nightly specials, was soft enough to spread on toast and very generous with the chard, although I found the agnolotti almost dessert-sweet. The menu includes a number of vegetable dishes that highlight the star ingredient (as opposed to just satisfying the demand for vegetarian options), like the marinated cucumbers with peppadew peppers and crunchy roasted and fried chickpeas and the aforementioned Brussels sprouts – and the giant “fee fi fo fum fries” are stellar, brown and salty and not greasy with a mayo-based dipping sauce. The menu changes daily, though, so the vietnamese caramel pork or the yellowtail sashimi with yuzu may not be there if you head over. It’s one of the best and most fun upscale meals I’ve had in a while.

Over in Long Beach, I tried the tiny, family-run (I presume) Korean place Sura, sparsely furnished but featuring the dish I was after, bibimbap. (They also have short ribs and bulgogi, which are the only other authentic Korean dishes I really know.) The bibimbap was good by my ignorant standards, with fresh ingredients and the egg brought tableside for me to crack directly into the hot bowl. Service was a little weird – the meal came with four small plates of “sides,” mostly pickled and/or fermented vegetables, which I tried, but since I hadn’t cleared them my server said, “oh, you haven’t even touched them.” I guess I missed the pre-meal contract obligating me to clean every plate. But I’d go again for the food.

Moving on to San Diego … I finally got to Neighborhood, which many of you recommended last year when I was taking the family there while I covered a Padres series. I love their philosophy, but wasn’t sold on the execution. The Local Animal sandwich is a good microcosm of the problem – what’s not to like about two kinds of pork (sausage and braised pork, presumably shoulder), caramelized onions, and gruyere on a crusty roll? Well, the fact that it’s not a sandwich, for one, but has the remaining ingredients, including a mustard/molasses glaze, sitting on top of bread that can’t be picked up or closed. And the piling of flavors just left the whole thing muddled, sweet and slightly tangy but with the pork, which should be the star of the show, left somewhere in the second or third row. The fries, which come with garlic mayo (they claim to have no ketchup on the premises), were extremely hot and so greasy that a package of Viagra wouldn’t have helped them. Neighborhood does have an outstanding beer selection; I went with the Alesmith Speedway Stout, which at 12% had its intended effect rather quickly.

I also met up with a couple of readers for lunch at the Burger Lounge location in Hillcrest on University. It’s a solid-average burger, made from high-quality local beef (their site claims it’s all from one farm where cows are grass-fed and are “well treated”), but without many choices for toppings (just two cheeses, white cheddar, which I don’t like, and American, which is just nauseous). The fries were solid-average as well, crispier a garlic-herb mixture sprinkled on top. And they have ketchup. I do actually like ketchup on my fries, crazy American that I am.

I can still vouch for breakfast at The Mission in North Park – rosemary bread, rosemary potatoes, perfectly cooked eggs, and a great atmosphere – but a return visit to the downtown Cafe 222 after many years was disappointing – their pumpkin pie waffle was just a mushy mess and tasted of stale spices, not pumpkin or pumpkin pie.

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→ May 14, 2011
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Charlottesville eats.

Thanks to all of you who fired over suggestions for my two meals in Charlottesville. (Except the guy who suggested Jimmy John’s. Why not just tell me to go to McDonald’s?) I wish I could have tried more places – and spent more time in Charlottesville, which looked like a very cool town with plenty of interesting places to eat.

Three popular suggestions from regulars that I didn’t try but wanted to pass along are Wayside Chicken (classic southern fried chicken), Bodo Bagels (although I am highly skeptical of claims that the bagels are better than any in NYC … come on) and Bellmont BBQ (known for their pulled pork). If and when I get back there – the one drawback of Charlottesville is it’s not that easy to get to, what with an airport straight out of Wings* – those places are at the top of my list.

*Before anyone gets the wrong idea: I hated that show.

The two I did hit were Peter Chang’s Chinese Grill and Mas Tapas. Peter Chang is both famous and infamous, earning a Wikipedia entry largely about his peripatetic ways and a New Yorker profile by Calvin Trillin titled “Where’s Chang?” The chef focuses on Sichuan cuisine, quite different from what we ordinarily and inaccurately refer to as “Chinese food” (making us, I suppose, a nation of synecdouches), generally spicier and with stronger flavors. I have very little experience with Sichuan cooking, so I can tell you that Peter Chang’s was fantastic but can’t speak to its authenticity.

After some discussion with the waiter, who seemed to know the menu but wasn’t all that quick to offer suggestions, I ended up with the spicy fragrant duck, a Peter Chang signature dish that delivered on both adjectives. This was probably a 60 on the 20-80 spiciness scale, about where I get off the spicy train. The duck is cut into chunks, mostly bone-in, coated in a thin layer of flour and cornstarch, deep fried (skin and all), and covered in a spicy rub or paste heavy on red chili and tossed with cilantro and garlic. It’s not for the light eater, but it’s big and bold and more than just hot, with the duck remaining tender through the heavy frying and the skin becoming impossibly crispy. I started with a hot and sour soup that gained its spice from red chilis rather than the traditional American-Chinese version with black peppercorns, giving it a more well-rounded flavor.

Mas Tapas does tapas right, heavy on the traditional Spanish fare, but also making good use of the wood-fired oven right behind the bar. (I was fortunate enough to sit in a little corner that looks directly into the fire.) I went with four of their most popular dishes, three hits and one miss. Their boquerones – white anchovies marinated in good olive oil, garlic, herbs, and vinegar – were solid, maybe just a touch fishy but I figure those are just the omega-3’s doing their thing, and if you get those you must get their house bread, a crusty, cold-fermented European-style loaf perfectly made to sop up the oil and vinegar from the fish. I am guessing that these boquerones were preserved rather than fresh, since I’ve only had fresh at one place (Toro in Boston) and they’re not easy to find in the U.S. Mas also has a bacon-wrapped date dish, not quite as good as Firefly’s (where they stuff the dates with almonds) but perfectly cooked; the way I see it, the omega-3’s from the fish cancel out the copious amount of bacon fat I consumed about five minutes later.

The one miss was the croquetas de jamón, thick grilled cakes of potato, Manchego cheese, bacon, and jamón serrano, dusted in cornmeal on the outside. The edges were crispy with a little sweetness from caramelization but the interior had the texture of baby food. If I could do it over again, I’d swap these out and try their tortilla española. I’ll also give bonus points to Mas for having Guinness on tap and not too cold and for plenty of eye candy on a Friday night.

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→ February 22, 2010
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Las Vegas eats, 2010 edition.

Latest draft blog post is on Kyle Blair, Sammy Solis, and Cory Vaughn. I’ll be on Baseball Tonight on ESPN Radio tonight in the 10 pm EST hour, and on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 8:10 am EST. I recorded 45-second previews for M&M on the four AL West teams, which will air some time over the next two weeks.

You’ve asked about this week’s chat (maybe Friday, definitely not the usual time on Thursday) and a podcast (still working on it, so Jason and I will probably bootstrap one in the short term). Thanks for bearing with me.

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I spent under 48 hours in Vegas last week and mostly went to places I’ve already talked about here (in December 2008) or in chats. I only have one truly new place to recommend an inexpensive breakfast spot in a strip mall a mile or two west of the Strip, called The Maple Tree. The concept is to serve the food you’d find in a New England diner or bed-and-breakfast, although I think it’s fair to say it’s more straight-up American breakfast. The one distinctive item I had was the maple muffin, a very light, airy pastry like an angel food cake with a pronounced maple flavor and none of the heaviness of a typical muffin. For the meal, I did a sampler so I could at least taste the pancake (fluffy, but a little bland without the syrup) while also getting the usual eggs, meat (a kielbasa sausage that was seared on the outside and therefore cold at the center), and country potatoes. Everything is cooked to order – in fact, I heard the waitress ask the cook why he only does one plate at a time, which is inefficient but meant I knew what I was getting was freshly prepared – and all that food ran only about $13 including tea.

Jason Churchill and I went to craftsteak on Friday night – and no, per diem didn’t quite cover it – which was my first time there since 2004. It was as spectacular as I remembered it, especially the 24-hour braised short rib, which is one of their signature dishes. (Granted, I’m not sure that 24 hours of braising, if that’s what they’re really saying, is necessary, but the dish is amazingly tender). For sides, we went with the mushroom risotto – a lot creamier than a typical risotto, and a little more al dente than a truly authentic one, but still plus courtesy of the mix of perfectly-sauteed wild mushrooms – and the asparagus, which was probably over a half-pound before cooking and flavored with fresh thyme. With two entrees and two sides, no booze, no dessert, the pre-tip bill was over $100, so I could easily see two people with big appetites and strong livers racking up a $200-250 bill no problem.

Churchill and I also hit two places where I’d eaten on that last trip, with both matching their previous reports. We went to Firefly with a crowd – there were six of us – so we ended up with a few items I hadn’t tried before. The tuna tartare was fair, good-quality fish but not all that flavorful outside of the mango/avocado accompaniment, but the merguez (spicy lamb sausage) was outstanding, and while I skipped the lamb chops the sauteed lentils that came with it were good enough to be a menu item in their own right. We also did lunch at Lotus of Siam, which is currently expanding but still open for business; the khao soi was somewhere between a noodle dish and a tom kha gai (soup), with sweet and spicy flavors brought to life by the assortment of pickled vegetables served alongside it.

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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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→ August 31, 2007
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Chicago eats.

So I had some ups and downs in Chicago, but I’m glad to say that after some mediocre meals to start, I finished strong.

The Oak Tree Room is in the same building as the Four Seasons, at 900 N Michigan Ave. I had read that they offered excellent cranberry-pecan pancakes, and I wanted to get some exercise, so I walked up there … and was disappointed. The pancakes were dry and flat, and the dried cranberries tasted more like candied fruit than dried.

Vong’s Thai Kitchen on Hubbard (near the Billy Goat Tavern) was another disappointment, not least because the service was comically bad. I still have no idea who my server was, and I ended up waiting about ten minutes to order (past the point where my menu was closed) and ten or fifteen minutes for someone to realize I was done and offer me the check. A waitress, maybe “my” waitress, did eventually come and ask if I wanted to try one of their “mini” desserts (which are apparently about $1.50) each, but by that point I was annoyed enough to just want to leave. Plus I had a gelateria in my sights for the afternoon.

Anyway, the food at Vong’s was also disappointing, since it’s not so much Thai food as haute cuisine served on a bed of Thai food. I skipped the pad thai, my usual bellwether dish for Thai restaurants, fearing it would be too sweet – let’s face it, there were no Thai customers in the place, and that’s not a good sign for the authenticity of the food. I ordered panang curry with “pulled” chicken, and the chicken part was very good, still moist and indeed resembling pulled chicken. But the peanut-dominated sauce was heavy and slightly bitter, and there wasn’t much else in the sauce besides the chicken and some peas. The complimentary salad of shredded daikon and carrots in a “Szechuan” vinaigrette (can we just call it a sesame vinaigrette? Is that so freaking hard? And why would I want a Szechuan vinaigrette in a Thai restaurant?) was very good, but a poor harbinger of what was to come.

Just across the street from the Oak Tree Room is an Italian deli called L’Appetito that purports to sell gelato. They don’t. That stuff is ice cream, a claim I can support by pointing out that I couldn’t get my plastic spoon into the stuff. Next.

I had dinner with a longtime email correspondent and regular on Baseball Think Factory, who goes by the handle “Shredder.” He suggested La Creperie on Clark, which is close to Wrigley Field without being right on top of it. Their savory crepes are all made with buckwheat, and I went with a chicken, goat cheese, and tomato crepe. It was delicious; the goat cheese was the dominant flavor, and it worked nicely with the béchamel sauce that filled the crepe. The chicken was white meat, a little overcooked (I assume it was cooked first before it was added to the crepe), but since it was sitting in the sauce it wasn’t a big deal. The tomatoes were fresh, but really, I could take or leave tomatoes. This was about the goat cheese, and the crepe itself, which was delicious, slightly nutty but not overwhelmingly buckwheaty.

Thursday’s breakfast was at Lou Mitchell’s on W Jackson St, near Canal. They’re known for their homemade pastries, so I asked the waitress what one pastry I should order, and I got this answer: “They’re all good.” Yeah, you’re a big help, sweetheart. I can see why you’re not in sales. I went with a coconut donut, which was one of the daily specials; it was a cake donut, very moist, but the glaze was sickeningly sweet and I only ate about a third of it. The Greek bread that came with the meal was a much bigger success, almost like a challah bread with a soft interior and a very crumbly exterior. As for the meal itself, I went with my usual EMPT, going for two eggs scrambled with bacon. The “two eggs” bit is a joke; the meal came in a seven- or eight-inch skillet, and the scrambled eggs took up half the skillet, which has to be at least four eggs considering how thick they were. They were cooked through, a touch dry, but good overall. The potatoes were sliced very thinly and appeared to be cooked solely on the flat-top in a pile, so that some were just steamed while others were nicely browned. Total $10.42 before tip.

Lunch was at the Frontera Grill, accompanied by Jayson Stark. I went with the tacos al carbon, and asked the waiter whether I should get the skirt steak (traditional) or the duck, and he said it was a coin flip but he’d take the duck. Thank God for someone with the cojones to answer one freaking question. Anyway, before the meal came we had some chips and two salsas, one green, the other a dark red with some sort of roasted peppers in it, and both were outstanding, with the red salsa spicy but not at all hot, and both boasting gorgeous bright colors. The tacos al carbon ($15) came with a delicious and clearly fresh guacamole that had never seen the inside of a food processor, with good chunks of avocado still in it and hints of garlic and cilantro that didn’t overwhelm the fresh avocado flavor. The duck was delicious, but unfortunately had some gristle in it, something I haven’t encountered before, although to be fair I usually go with duck leg rather than breast. The meat was medium-rare, but more rare in some parts (where the gristle was) and medium in others. The best part of the dish was something I can only call a Mexican version of baked beans (frijoles charros), with red beans perfectly cooked (soft but al dente) in a reduced, smoky-sweet sauce redolent of bacon. Jayson ordered a shrimp dish ( camarones en salsa verde con hongos) that he said was one of the best things he had ever tasted.

My last meal in Chicago was probably the most interesting of the trip, mostly good, some less good. The place is called Twist, and it’s a tapas bar (tapas here meaning “small plates,” not Spanish food) down Sheffield, a block or two south of Wrigley Field. Overall the food was good, made from fresh ingredients and prepared right in front of anyone who sits at the bar (as I did). I ordered three dishes: braised beef tenderloin on a corn cake with feta and a spicy aioli, dates wrapped in bacon, and grilled “vegetables” (zucchini and yellow squash, as it turns out) on crostini with goat cheese. The last dish was the biggest hit for me; the bread used for the crostini was delicious, and there was just a dab of goat cheese sitting on a small spread of roasted red pepper purée sitting on the slab of squash. It was perfect, with accent flavors from the toppings complementing but not overwhelming the flavor of the squash, finished with a nice crunch.

The dates wrapped in bacon were excellent, except for one thing: the dates themselves were sugared, making for a bizarre, sweet note to finish the dish, not a flavor I’m used to experiencing in a savory dish. The bacon was perfectly cooked, and the dish came with a thick balsamic-based sauce with a gravy-like consistency, although I couldn’t tell you how much it contributed since “sweet” was the dominant flavor.

The big question mark for me was the beef tenderloin. The beef was marinated in something strong and acidic, most likely a red wine concoction, and was served shredded in a mound on a corn cake (very soft, with a consistency more like grits than polenta, and oddly enough, no actual corn kernels), with large hunks of feta cheese, chopped red onion and tomatoes, and then lines of a spicy “aioli” that was really mayonnaise with chili oil or hot sauce added. (True aioli doesn’t have egg yolks in it, but this sauce did.) Think about that flavor combination: the beef, cheese, onions, and tomatoes are all acidic and tangy, pleasant flavors in small doses but overwhelming in large doses. The only other flavor in the dish is the heat from the spicy aioli. The corn cakes weren’t sweet, and weren’t really salty, although it’s possible that all the sour/tangy/spicy numbed my mouth to the point where I couldn’t taste what they offered. The shame of it all is that the ingredients in the dish were good and the concept was as well: a piece of braised beef tenderloin, preferably served whole, on a sweet corn cake with corn in it, with a spicy aioli or mayo would have been perfect, simpler, cheaper to make, and less of a mess on the plate. There was a good dish hiding in here, but I couldn’t make it out because they went overboard with the additions.

All that said, I’d definitely recommend Twist as a pre-Cubs game hideout. At 5:40 on a Thursday game night, there was no wait, and the place wasn’t full when I left. The food was good, the place is nice, and you don’t have to deal with Cubs fans or tourists who view the game as an excuse to get hammered. I’m just hoping that the Twist chefs simplify some of their dishes to let the clean flavors of the ingredients come through.

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