Category: Uncategorized
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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 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 religious…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Don’t Look Back In Anger – Three Meals in London
London might well be the best food city in the world right now. Don’t believe me? Visit any of its high temples of gastronomy—St. John, or Trivet, or Bouchon Racine—and you’ll immediately see why its culinarians are revered as the vanguard of modern cuisine, and why its kitchens are rightly celebrated as bastions of culinary ingenuity and…
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For What Ails You – Nashville Hot Chicken at Chicago’s Fry the Coop
Every displaced Southerner I know has her own panacea for homesickness. For some, it’s a spoonful of Duke’s mayonnaise, eaten in secret, and often at midnight, by the light of an open refrigerator door. For others, it’s a cat’s head biscuit, slathered in bacon grease, and soaked in Crystal hot sauce, that allays all longing for home. But…
Propaganda by Proletariateats 