New York is among the most dynamic food scenes in the world. I couldn’t hope to keep up with it, even if I tried. And trust me, I’m not trying. That said, I used to live there, I often travel there and I still love to eat there. One clever lie that New Yorkers tend to heap onto unsuspecting tourists is that there is no end to the good food in New York City, that you can walk into almost any restaurant and the forces that conspire to make New York “the greatest city in the world,” co-conspire to ensure that any restaurant you enter will serve you very good food. That’s bullshit.
Category: Other Musings
Galician-Style Grilled Octopus (With Easy and Vegetarian Preparation Options)!
The first time I had this Galician-style dish was many years ago in Sevilla. There, it was served with boiled potatoes and braised octopus. Although delicious, it was a bit too traditional. One problem that traditional cuisines often face is that they’re too rooted in tradition. That is to say, they could use some modern cooking techniques, informed by our contemporary understanding of food science. I’ve done that here.
Spaghetti alla marinara con gamberetti e cozze
No one really knows where marinara comes from, but according to folk histories, the wives of sailors would prepare marinara for their husbands returning from the sea. As a result, it seems fitting that I include some delicious seafood in this recipe, keeping with tradition. Have a question? Ask me anything! Ingredients – Serves Four…
Trial, Error, Music and Cooking
Music is an endless fount of metaphor and inspiration across all areas of life. As philosopher Dan Dennett once observed, “Music is unique to our species, but found in every human culture.” There are few things more natural to us and few things that I’m personally more passionate about than music (perhaps food can be…
How to Find a Better Restaurant (Or My Collected Restaurant and Bar Guides)
I’ve been traveling fairly regularly to San Francisco for years. Yet, until recently, I’d mostly dread those trips. San Francisco is expensive, its people half kind and generous, half aggressively irritating and it’s food scene, pretentious, fickle, boring (or so I thought). As it turns out, and to my delight, there is some good food in…
The Fat of Our Land
The American diet borders on self-parody. We are fat and we are actually getting fatter. As of 2014, two out of every three Americans were considered to be clinically overweight or obese. The numbers keep rising despite the best efforts of people who have devoted their lives to this issue, expert advocates for health and…
The Violet Hour, Chicago
Whenever poetry is quoted out of context on a bar’s web site, it commonly isn’t an indication of better things to come. The quote to which I’m alluding, appearing in the “About” section of the The Violet Hour’s web site, is from section III, “The Fire Sermon,” of T.S. Eliot’s long poem, The Waste Land….
Earth + Ocean, Mount Prospect
View my brunch-only review of E+O from summer 2013. I enjoy faceless corporate manipulation. Not so much because I approve of it, but more because it’s fun to watch just like a zombie film is fun to watch. True, we know what’s going to happen–fools will be separated from their hard earned money just like zombie…
Three Dots and a Dash, Chicago
The story of the tiki cocktail and tiki culture dates back quite a while (but probably not as far back as you may think). Its story is wrapped in history, America’s perception of the world and the evolution of that perception. As a result, this will be an unusual review of one such tiki bar,…
Sanjay Keswani 