I never thought Mirepoix would make it. I didn’t believe that Bryan Moscatello and crew could squeeze Adega’s smart, beautiful cuisine into a JW Marriott corporate template; I kept seeing all that lovely food dying under the domes of room-service trays. And the fact that they were trading on the…
Phil Collier, owner and executive chef of A La Tomate Cafe and Tarterie, is a nervous sort of fella. I can see him in the kitchen — a big space for such a small place, full of tall bakery racks, new ovens, antique slicers with exposed motors, bright stainless steel…
Wild-mushroom-and-Fontina grilled cheese. Frittatas; toasted-oat pancakes that taste like giant oatmeal raisin cookies laced with wispy vanilla; seared tuna in a soy-ginger glaze. Eggs Benedict made with poached eggs wrapped in smoky Nova lox and topped with crème fraîche, and a breakfast pizza assembled from scrambled eggs, beef tenderloin, sprigged…
Once is an event, twice is a coincidence, but three times? Three times is the beginning of an addiction, and for the Bush administration, Heaven Dragon Chinese Cuisine and Lounge is starting to look like an unhealthy habit. It was back in 2002 that President George W. Bush got his…
One of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the country, Dac Hoa, is in Rochester, New York. It’s a small, Barton Fink-ish place, with a perpetual pall of dishwater gray light, rickety tables and peeling everything in a borderline-creepy neighborhood. Still, most people who eat there have no idea how good…
The International House of Pancakes seemed like the obvious choice for breakfast. I had friends in town — non-foodie friends who couldn’t pick a head of endive out of a lineup even if I spotted them three food groups — and the IHOP was walking distance from their hotel. We…
I saw successively imprinted on every face the glow of desire, the ecstasy of enjoyment, and the perfect calm of utter bliss. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste It was the strangest sort of party, uncomfortably intimate and cheerful for no reason at all. This was 1994, maybe…
I stopped by on a whim, at about five-thirty in the afternoon, drawn in by both the action and the tickle on my internal culinary Geiger counter. Regardless of what the clock said, I wanted lunch, since I’d slept really late and already had two dinners scheduled for that night…
It’s the simplest thing, and it’s almost universally overlooked in the fast-paced, big-business kitchens of the world. There it’s a throwaway, a gimme course, with the duty of making it generally given over to the lowest guy on the galley totem pole. The soup. The free bread on the table…
We’d both woken up mad, the wife and I. Rolled out of bed pissed off, brushed our teeth pissed off, then gotten dressed pissed off, each under our own cloud of bad feelings and faulty neurochemistry. Wisely, we tried to avoid each other, to keep our two clouds from bumping…
It was a knee-jerk New Yorker’s reflex that led me to Famous Pizza. Make that Famous Pizza #1. “The Original Famous Pizza,” as spelled out on the front window and the menu. Opened by Gus Mavrocefalos in 1974, this joint has been operating out of its crooked storefront for thirty…
What’s that?” asks the young Vietnamese guy sitting at the table across from mine. He brings his hands together, palms touching, then opens them — miming the book I have in one hand. I raise it up off the table and show him the cover — it’s my well-thumbed copy…
The kitchen at Zengo is a mess, a riot of white jackets, ice and fire. I count six, eight, maybe as many as ten cooks bouncing, spinning in place, shuffling plates and pans and sheet trays; hear raised voices — no particular words, just the sharp cadence of a chef…
My buddy Gracie and I have this map — a U.S. highway diagram torn from the front of an old Rand McNally atlas, showing all of the major interstate routes spooling out across the fruited plain. From I-95’s start in Florida’s malarial salt bogs to the terminus of I-90 in…
Japanese cartoons are lysergic-acid freak shows of giant robots and big-eyed children, blinking lights and talking cats, and jumpy, herky-jerky dancing-root vegetables. Japanese porno is vile and fetishistic. Japanese punk music is ten times more screechy and primal than that of any teenage American garage band — often reduced to…
Cheeseburgers are the single most recognizable American contribution to the world culinary scene (and, according to a monument on Speer Boulevard, an actual Denver invention). They’re also the ideal thing to eat on a blazing-hot afternoon. So last week when the temperature hit 97 degrees, I hit the road for…
There are a few things that I like about Boulder and many that I don’t. For example, it bothers me that Boulder exists where it does, snugged up tight against the base of the Flatirons, frantically humping the leg of a mountain range that would be that much more splendid…
I believe that life, in all its brutish, stupid grandeur, is the ultimate extreme sport. Forget mountain biking, snowboarding and base jumping. You just haven’t lived until you’ve Indian leg-wrestled a hungry Russian grandmother over the last fistful of peel-and-eat shrimp bobbing in the melted ice at a Chinese buffet,…
Saturday night should be busy. Cute place like this, good food, service that’s old-American doting without being old-French smothering — Dario’s Restaurant should be running the edge of a full house, playing the curve of table turns so that every party leaving brushes shoulders with the next one coming through…
Of Earth and Spirit is how I describe my style of cooking. The foods chosen are pure and of the Earth; they are intended to be food for the spirit as well as sustenance. They have been prepared for generations by the distinctive combination of Native, Mexican and Spanish flavors…
Back when I was hungry and vicious and always questing after dumb-luck fortune in the galleys and basement kitchens of this country, I could smell doom in a restaurant a mile away. It was a survival mechanism then, learned rather than instinctive, though no less hardwired into my autonomic switchboard…
Here’s what Emil-Lene’s Sirloin House is missing: a really big steak. Not just a big steak — big steaks it’s got. There’s a 16-ounce sirloin on the board, a 10-ounce prime rib that’s cut so generously it takes up half a plate, even a 24- ounce T-bone that certainly far…
