Category: Restaurants & Stores

tallasiandude took me to the Tuscan Grill the night before I left for Chicago. This was a bittersweet evening — many tears have been shed as I have made my way to the midwest, but our dinner at the grill was as wonderful as always, if not perhaps more so. This is our restaurant, much the way other couples have “our song.” We don’t generally go there with anyone but ourselves, and it is so close to the house that we could almost (almost but not quite) walk there. And we always sit at the bar, for a host of reasons: it’s faster to get a seat, the bar itself is lovely to look at, all dark wood and glass, and the bartender (& owner?) is one of the best ever. He’s genial but not aggressively friendly, he’s attentive in a most unobtrusive way, and he’s as genuinely enthusiastic about the food as we are.
We used to overorder (us? overorder? *gasp*) and roll out of there stuffed to the point of pain, but we’ve mastered the art of ordering by now. The trick is to go easy on two of the three courses, and simply share one dish instead of two. This time we had a single antipasto, a single half-order of pasta, and two entrees.
The starter was a no-brainer to order — anything called “duck three ways” and claiming to involve both confit and pate is something i must eat. The third way was a duck proscuitto, and the works came with crostini & a lemony fig conserve. Gorgeous. The pasta was a wild-mushroom cannelloni in a mushroom broth, which was creamy and light and full of mushroom flavor, a wonderfully simple dish after the rich savory duck treats.
The two perennial highlights of the secondi are always the hanger steak and the scallops — this time the fish special trumped the scallops but the hanger steak was spectacular as always, tender and intensely meaty and almost crispy on the outside. It came with sauteed escarole and a gratin of penne and grated parsnips. I love the veg-pasta gratins they do at the Tuscan Grill, and this one was particularly delightful, the sweetness of the parsnips bringing out both the wheatiness of the pasta and the flavor of the meat. It is a very clever idea, marrying vegetable and pasta under a thin blanket of cream and a toasted crust of parmesan — i have seen them do this with cauliflower and other veg as well — and I am going to have to borrow it one of these days for a dinner party.
The fish was a piece of halibut with a perfect crunchy golden crust, a simple butter sauce, and a huge pile of black trumpet mushrooms, flanked by a pile of baby spinach lightly dressed and decorated with a handful of lovely rock shrimp. This time even tallasiandude was wrestling with the impulse to lick the plate, and there were many surreptitious swipes of the finger through the sauce left on the plate, a luscious blend of butter, fish juices, mushroom juices and just a wisp of acid from the salad. It is a damned shame that we can’t get fish like this without going to the top-shelf restaurants. We live on the ocean, within an hour’s drive of a major fishing city, and yet the average person will get utter dreck when ordering fish in the average restaurant or buying in a normal supermarket. Scandalous.
Dessert was a half-bottle of moscato d’asti, a particularly fruity, peachy version called Nivole, along with a single unctuous creme brulee that we shared. And then we went home to snuggle and watch the special features on the Incredibles dvd, because we are just that geeky. It was a lovely night, making quite clear the wonderful man unfortunately still in Boston while I forge on with this project of living in Chicago.

For years I have been eating at Casablanca in Harvard Square, and it has never yet disappointed me. The menu is hard to describe, sort of a pan-mediterranean quasi-north African flavor, with simple food in creative combinations, prepared perfectly.
For instance, tonight I had a dish I have had once before and was unable to resist ordering a second time: grilled bluefish over black chickpea puree and green beans, with yogurt sauce. This time the fish had a pomegranate-citrus glaze and a lemony sauce along with the yogurt. The tangy, sweet, earthy, nutty, creamy flavors all blend perfectly with the rich fish, and the green beans are bright green yet soft, and add a fresh clean flavor to the complex richness of everything else on the plate. Tallasiandude used to think he disliked bluefish until he tasted my dinner tonight.

Fish here is always utterly fresh and delicious, and cooked perfectly. Normally I won’t ever order fish in the first place, because it generally is not fresh or not cooked well or both, and it’s just a depressing waste of time, but at Casablanca I eat fish more often than not. Tallasiandude and D both had the poached sole, mild and clean, glowing white against a pool of black rice, black trumpet mushrooms and yellow foot mushrooms in a dark-colored but light-flavored broth, with brussels sprouts & cipollini onions. Very different from the richness of my fish, but nearly as lovely. And B had a stunner of a dish: venison with braised pears, toasted hazelnuts, sauteed spinach, blue cheese, and a sweet orange vegetable in phyllo that we think was honeyed butternut squash. The sauce was very thin and slightly sweet, not syrupy but just enough to set off the lean meatiness of the venison. The dish would not have worked as well with beef, but with venison it was tone perfect.
Even simple salads and starters are great here. Tallasiandude had romaine hearts with parmesan cream and a soft poached egg & crostini; he gave me the olives because he hates them, but loved the rest of the dish. My salad was frisee and endive with pink grapefruit, walnuts and aged goat cheese. I loved it, and the flavor combo was terrific, but I am a cheese whore and would have gone easier on the walnuts and upped the cheese, which got a little lost. D had a grilled portobello which he adored, and B had a gorgeous velvet-brown soup of caramelized fennel and potato.
I can’t gush enough about this restaurant. The food is so good, and so *reliably* good. It’s interesting AND satisfying. It’s healthy: lots of vegetables and legumes and grains, and the portions are sane. And it’s a fancy festive place with a relaxed atmosphere, so you can dress as you like — even better, you can get the same food in the bar, which is louder and even more casual. If only every spendy restaurant was this good…

Based on the contents of a long article in the Boston Globe food section, I have been wanting to check out Chilli Garden in Medford for a while now. And this weekend I got my chance, as I was planning to get together with S + D, old friends who live in Medford, for brunch. And hoo boy, it delivered.
Do not be dismayed by the first page of the menu, which is alarmingly standard Chinese-in-America offerings; turn the page and relax into 4 pages’ worth of Sichuan dishes, many of them with an adorable little sputtering-cherry-bomb icon next to them indicating spicy heat. We had some pickled wild vegetable, dan dan noodles (SO good), and dumplings in spicy vinegar sauce. These dumplings were the best thing on a table full of great things. They were so fucking good I ate the sauce with a spoon, and my tablemates were gracious enough to let me have most of it. I love my friends.
We also had some shrimps in spicy sauce with broccoli & chunks of dried chile pepper, ma po tofu, and twice-cooked pork belly in black bean sauce with green peppers (not gross bell peppers, happily, but some sort of more delicately flavored slightly-spicy pepper). This last wasn’t spicy, but the thin-sliced pork was terrific, very meaty and flavorful, and the fat was nice and soft and yielding, not at all stringy or icky in any way. (Again a waitress tried to steer me away from a fatty pork dish, and again I have been amply rewarded for my insistence. Let’s hear it for fat pigs and their wondrous transformations by the cuisines of the world!)
Dessert’s good too. We had black sesame rice balls, which are little mochi-like balls stuffed with sweet black sesame paste (identical to the sesame tea-cake tallasiandude brought back from China), and floated in hot syrup or water. They are DEE-licious. As it happens, I had this same dessert for the first time just last week, at Anna’s Dessert House in Chinatown. The ones at Anna’s were more syrupy sweet, while the ones at Chilli Garden were much finer & lighter. Yum yum yum.
I recommend you try this place out, and bring friends so you can have a wide selection of dishes. It’s easy enough to get to by car, and it appears to be very close to the commuter rail stop as well, so no excuses. Keep them in business; I want to go back next time I am back in Boston for a visit.

At last I have eaten the duck fat french fry. I went to Hot Doug’s encased meats emporium, and had duck fries, a lamb-mint sausage with feta, and a Cel-Ray soda, all of which I enjoyed immensely. The fries could have been crispier for my taste, but never have I enjoyed a mostly floppy fry so much, as they had lovely potato and fat flavor, and perfect amounts of flaky kosher (sea?) salt clinging to them. The floppiness may have been because I arrived around 11am, just before the lunch rush — as I left there was a line out the door — and word on the street says the duck fries are best when they’re busy. Hilariously, the place is in the middle of nowhere, and yet sees a constant stream of hipsters and weird old guys and yuppies with little kids. Viva Doug and his encased meats for all!
Fantastic quesadillas at Dona Lolis on Clark in Rogers Park, especially the huitlacoche, though the squash blossom and chicharron were nice too. Homemade corn tortillas, so very dense and filling, with wonderful homemade flavors.
Really good Thai food at Spoon Thai, especially the pork larb from the special menu, a salad of thin sliced fat-streaked pork, all tangy with lime and onion, savory with fish sauce and a hit of chili pepper.
And lastly a sunday brunch at Jamaica Jerk, also up north in Rogers Park, which looks to be a family run place. It has a bright interior with a seascape on one wall, and a panorama of delicious things to eat: brown stew chicken and oxtails with beans were both super-dark brown and intensely savory; saltfish with bacon and tomatoes and spice was just lovely, especially with the thick chewy fried-starch triangles (bammies, no idea what they are made from); festival, floury little pillows of deepfried goodness; coconut shrimp that were just the right amount of sweet and crunchy; and pineapple-sorrel juice that was outrageously purple and delicious.
So yeah, Chicago has the good eats. Yum. 🙂

So we went to LA to meet up with friends and go hike in the Mojave… but as you may have read, the west coast was having a two-week monsoon while we were there. Torrents of water coursing down every street — i got a shoeful of water when I was fool enough to step around my car to fetch out the luggage. The shoes didn’t dry out for 5 days because it was so damp everywhere. The pool in tallasiandude’s parents’ backyard was overflowing and full of silty water. Roads were closed in the mountain passes, hell, even in the LA canyons; we drove up Laurel Canyon right before they closed it and there were trees that had just pulled right out of the muddy hillside and fallen into the street, and piles of mudslide everywhere. So, um, we didn’t hike.
Instead, we ate. Lord, did we eat. Most of the time we didn’t even have enough time between scheduled meal events to even be hungry again. Let two food whores loose on a city like Los Angeles and it’s gonna get ugly.
First hedge & I tried to find a congee palace, which seemed to have gone out of business since the review was written. Then we tried to find a dumpling place recommended by Jonathan Gold: closed just as we arrived. Then, just as we were about to gnaw off limbs from driving around the San Gabriel Valley for two hours, we found Chang’s Garden, another well-reviewed Shanghainese place. And then we ordered food for seven. We had some sticky rice in lotus leaves, mustard greens with edamame & tofu sheets (I love this dish), dry fried long beans & pork wrapped in fried bread, and the best pork dish I’ve had in years: Tung Po pork, which is luscious savory unctuous fatty meaty squares of pork braised in a rich thick dark soy & star anise broth. Lord have mercy, it’s fat-licious. The waitress who took our order tried to talk us out of it, telling us it had a lot of fat and shaking her head with concern; we told her we live to eat fat, yes please, bring us the fatty pork dish. And then the waitress who brought it gave us a big smile and told us it was her favorite dish in the restaurant. We have to agree with her. We ate at Chang’s Garden a second time due to further restaurant-timing snafus, and had chicken braised with chestnuts, a seafood soup in a lovely light broth, yu hsiang eggplant, and xiao lung bao soup dumplings — all terrific, but none as spectacularly delicious as the Tung Po pork.
On the way out of the Hawaii supermarket we found a woman with a strange round cast iron cooker with small round holes, and a sign describing the sweet fillings available: cream, coconut, green bean paste, red bean paste, taro. She filled the holes with batter, then after a while, topped some with filling, then to serve them she fished an empty cooked cake out and put it over the filling on the first cake, making a sandwich. We had cream and taro flavor fried cakes, little hot crunchy rounds with steaming hot soft crumb and sticky sweet filling — yum.
We ate at Sasabune. Our one deviance from unwavering loyalty to the “Trust Me” sushi master was unsatisfying, and we will never again be so foolish. This time the best things were the simplest: a piece of fucking unreal yellowtail and a piece of lightly cooked butterfish (same as black cod?). Every time it’s similar, and every time it’s different, and the anticipation of every new mouthgasm is almost as much fun as the actual ‘gasm itself.
We ate at Mei Lung (also in San Gabriel) and had wuxi spareribs, more tofu & greens, noodles with spicy bean/meat sauce, and more xiao lung bao almost as good as the ones at Chang’s. You got to love a place where soup dumplings are thicker on the ground than grass. We ate at Dai Ho, reknowned for its spicy beef noodle soup, which was not the droid tallasiandude was looking for, but hit the spot nevertheless for rain-sodden travelers. Dai Ho is manned by a soup nazi proprietor who tells you what you can and cannot eat, so i guess we were lucky to get our bowls. We supplemented with soy-marinated whole squids, salty preserved mustard greens with shredded beef (my favorite side), cabbage pickles, and some very nice seaweed.
We ate at Grace, a fancy-pants place, for hedge’s birthday, and I gotta tell you it’s a treat to eat highfalutin’ food with not just one but many people who are willing to let you snack off their plate. Best of show was tallasiandude’s starter, which was braised pork belly with dense little pastas, and his entree of seared scallops with an accompaniment of red wine reduction, farro and greens, which worked really well despite being non-traditionally heavy accents for scallops. There was a crisp light crab salad with mixed citrus vinaigrette & radish sprouts, and a duck prosciutto frisee salad, and a fantastically flavorful filet of wild boar with spaetzle & cabbage. And a cocktail that was basically a vodka mojito made with thyme & mint, something I am so going to try once spring returns to Boston — that little note of savory from the thyme makes it all much more interesting.
We had tea and pastries at Jin, cowering on the tiny porch rather than reclining on the outdoor round couches beneath the palms, because of course, monsoon. The best were the macarons, which really do seem to be the dessert of the moment — there were huge pyramids of them in the window at Boule, the new bakery outpost of trendy Sona, neither of which we were able to patronize this trip. Passionfruit & rosepetal macarons, little cakes that were tasty enough but gorgeous to the eye, and handmade chocolate micro-truffles filled with fleur-de-sel caramel or scented tea. All of it fine, none of it worth the price, but perhaps I would reconsider my position had I been on one of those couches bathed in a Santa Monica breeze.
And after my Las Vegas dinner at In-N-Out, we got up early to catch the flight home and stopped for breakfast at the 24-hour Korean restaurant, Ginseng. No one in the place at 7am except for two hot chicks who clearly just got off work in one of the bars or clubs. Spicy beef and scallion soup for me, plain beef broth soup for tallasiandude, and the requisite pan chan that make life worthwhile. A day that starts with pickles and spicy soup and rice is a good day indeed.

I know it’s already well known, but I am so in love with In-N-Out burgers that I have to say it again. These are the best burgers EVER. They are perfect. They are simple and sublime. And the reason they are so perfect is that they are made with real ingredients, gotten fresh every day, and they are not tarted up to be something they are not. The people who make them do not screw around with fish or chicken or salad; they make burgers and fries and nothing else. These burgers are so good I am even willing to overlook the fact that the company is owned by people who feel the need to put scripture on the burger-wrappers.
I had had exactly one In-N-Out burger up until this last trip to LA, and I was counting the days until I got another. I drooled with anticipation, even as we spent our days slurping up one fantastic asian meal after another, followed by a fancy spendy dinner and some exquisitely foofy pastries (more on these to follow). And finally, on the last night of the trip, in Las Vegas, I got my burger on. Oh yeah.

mmmmmm, we found a good one. In Woburn there’s a new store called Hot Breads that sells Indian pastries and sandwiches, along with some standard breads and cakes. What could be better on a cold drizzly Saturday than a buttery croissant filled with keema (spiced minced meat) or an open-face “danish” filled with chicken tikka? The answer is either vada pav or dabeli. Vada pav is a spicy savory mashed potato patty, fried & served on a small soft bun spread with spicy mint chutney & run under a sandwich press to toast, with raw onions & a wedge of lime on the side, both of which are worthy additions. Dabeli is a mixture of chickpeas, tomatoes, potato, spices and wee crunchy noodles, served in the same fashion. Holy mackerel, these sammies are good! Yum! For dessert, there are regular sweet cakes & cookies, but also slightly salty masala cookies and cumin seed cookies (my favorite). And everything is very reasonably priced ($1.75 for the croissants, $3 for a single order of two vada pav). Too bad my office isn’t in Woburn anymore. Sigh.

When in London last November, we ate in a really stupendous Indian restaurant in a northern suburb with a friend, but by the time we got home, we’d lost track of the name of both the restaurant and the suburb. Now maybe we’re easily impressed Americans dulled by the sad state of Indian cookery on our shores, but I was licking plates. This place was so much better than the trendy Pakistani place recommended by droves of people on chowhound.com, which was downright disappointing. I could probably dig up the name of that place, but why would I ever bother, when I have found a little paper wrapper in amongst some really tragically overdue paperwork and now can tell you that we got the *real* eats at Raaz Brasserie in Muswell Hill? 176-178 Fortis Green Road, Muswell Hill, London N10 3DU. 020-8442-1320 or 020 8444 8322. Yay!

mmmmm… Nuggets took us to this place for ‘bar’s birthday dinner: good job, Nuggie! I only got there to eat scraps off everyone’s plate and have a drink before dessert, but damn, those were some good scraps. A steak like buttah with a plate-lickable chipotle tomato sauce, good guacamole & chips, and a ceviche that is the closest thing I’ve had to the veracruz seafood cocktail from the Maxwell St. mexican market in Chicago (which, btw, is a total mouthgasm and worth airfare to chicago). YUM! Tucked away in a basement in an alley off Gloucester Street in Back Bay, in a tiny warren of rooms packed with tiles and dark wood. Fabulous front door. It’s what the old Casa Mexico in Harvard Square always wanted to be, but couldn’t because the decor was lame and the food was lamer.

Penzey’s Spices decided to expand their chain of spice stores. So they ran a postcard contest, and whichever city sent in the most cards got the store. Boston won — woohoo! (and no thanks to my lazy procrastinating ass, sadly). This is good policy in and of itself, being community focused and democratic.
But just now I got a phone call from a nice lady in Wisconsin who wanted to know my thoughts on a store location they’re considering. We talked about the neighborhood (Mass Ave near Arlington Town Hall), public transit access, parking, accessibility for those from outside the city (NH, or similar), and other general matters concerning whether or not it was a good spot to settle in. This is an amazing thing! They got my info from my order history (I buy a lot of stuff, I admit it) and called me up, person to person, to get the skinny from someone who would actually be going to the store, and who knows the area as a local, and they’re undoubtedly going to tally up all the responses to make a composite picture of what they’re getting into. Genius! Blindingly simple.
I feel strongly about supporting businesses that conduct themselves in a sustainable, customer and community friendly manner, and this just seals it. I can’t wait for January, when I can scoot over to Arlington anytime I want and buy fresh, exotic, yummy spices from nice midwestern people who do things properly.