-
Cowboy Up! – Horseman’s Haven Cafe – Santa Fe
The burning starts in the back of your throat on your first bite of enchilada, sudden and intense, like heat from a grass fire, and then spills down your esophagus, like some flaming waterfall, until it reaches your stomach. There, it ignites a waiting claymore of gastric acid, driving auguries of imminent scatological torment into the…
-
Motor City Serenade – Shish Tawook at Al-Ameer – Detroit
Here you are in Detroit, on a four-hour layover, with time enough in your flight schedule to flee the gastronomic chicanery of Wayne County Airport and find yourself something truly delicious to eat. Today, you get one culinary crack at the Motor City, boy-o, so what’s it going to be? Should you grab a Coney Island at…
-
Anemone of the Amazon – Eating in Guyana
The Jonestown Massacre. Any mention of Guyana, and I’m guessing it’s the Jonestown Massacre that comes to mind. Ponder the subject of Guyana and its infamous massacre any further, and this is what you’ll likely recall: how, in November 1978, at an agricultural commune in a densely jungled part of the South American country, the American expat and…
-
The Bird Abides – Peruvian Chicken at El Pollo Rico – Washington, D.C.
Love at first bite. That’s precisely what occurred at El Pollo Rico on May 24, 2010—a Friday, I recall—sometime around 3 PM, after lunch, when the restaurant was empty and quiet, save the crackle of its charcoal fire, and the Spanish murmuration of its palpably exhausted, post-rush staff. That’s when I first wandered into the little, out-of-the-way…
-
Kurt Cobain Never Did This – Eating at Seattle’s Magnificent Bangrak Market
Think of Seattle and tell me what comes to mind. Is it the city’s dimly-lit coffee houses of yore—like the very first Starbucks in Pike Place Market—that you’re thinking of? Is it the Space Needle? Or perhaps you’re subsumed with the vestigial miasma of that once-mighty, grunge-rock scene—that particular scent now filling your head—with a pure and pungent…
-
Beneath the Sheltering Sky – Marrakesh’s Miraculous Restaurant Imaj
My mission was in Marrakesh: five days at the Royal Mansur as culinary intermediary for the kind of Indian wedding that’s photographed for the New York Times. Five days of celebration. Five days of total, saturnalian annihilation. This wedding had it all. A sangeet and baraat. A haldi and mehendi. Even an ultra-formal, western-style dinner following the ceremony. Five days of consecutive buyouts at…
-
Top Dogs & Hotdog Soup at Chicago’s Cobra Lounge
They call it dragging it through the garden, this process by which Chicagoans turn the everyday hotdog into a thing of gastronomic wonder. The alchemy through which Windy City culinarians accomplish this is uncomplicated, but exact: they take a hotdog—boiled or grilled—and put it on a bun. Then they top that bun with celery salt, pickled sport peppers, white…
-
The Battle of Los Angeles – Singapore’s Banana Leaf
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. This from Coleridge. A single line of verse so neatly describing the paradox of plenty, the idea of bounty without benefit. It’s also a line that perfectly encapsulates my recent experience with the food scene of Hollywood. Because three weeks ago, there I was: smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles,…
-
In Praise of the Utility Slice – New York
It’s at the heart of culinary New York, this thing, this wonderment, that fills and flutters the ventricles and valves of the most hyper-systolic food scene in America, and which sends the pulses of eaters, like me, into spasms of tachycardiac joy. Sure, it’s pizza we’re talking about. But not just any pie. Not that deep-dish casserole shit they serve in Chicago. Not…
-
The Revolution Starts Now – Tacos at Chicago’s Taqueria Chingon
These are not your father’s tacos. These are the tacos of revolution, the very apotheosis of a culinary uprising that seeks to ennoble and elevate the more traditional stalwarts of modern gastronomy through the ardent application of enhanced sourcing and technique, ultimately endeavoring to devise a new gustatory form wholly finer in function and flavor than…
Propaganda by Proletariateats
A Culinary Blogifesto
Propaganda by Proletariateats 