Quick, name a regional specialty for northern Utah?

Okay, besides skiing and beautiful vistas of the Wasatch Mountains. Chances are, the culinary peaks of the Salt Lake Valley elude most of us. In fact, talk to most people, and Salt Lake comes off as a cultural and culinary wasteland. Maybe that’s why coming across an example of American fast food greatness in Utah felt and tasted so good. More »

Max’s Ghetto Fries

Chicago is the land of the obese, the corporate home of McDonald’s, purveyor of deep dish pizza, slinger of fat Vienna franks, and yet we still cede our title of supreme imperial culinary hedonism to Quebec by not adopting poutine, a cholesterol bomb of French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. More »

The Jibarito from Borinquen Lounge

It took ethnic comfort food to make me forsake my own mother, but, Puerto Rican jibaritos (hi-bar-itoes)–deep fried plantain sandwiches–and Vietnamese pho (fuh)–beef tendon soup–have displaced her chicken noodle and grilled bologna and cheese in my personal comfort-food pantheon. If you ever saw my mom tenderize a recalcitrant pork chop or bring the gleaming business end of her Wusthof cleaver to bear on bloody tenderloin, you’d know that I’m betting a whole lot on the notion that the mother and son bond will keep me safe. More »

Gennaro’s Gnocchi

Gennaro’s is the kind of restaurant no one writes about until it closes.

It’s not the oldest restaurant in the city, it doesn’t have liquor license number one, they don’t dip the Italian sausage in liquid nitrogen and the interior doesn’t look like a Frank Gehry dream of imploding stainless steel. It’s just an old red-sauce emporium in Little Italy whose stoop is darkened by the shadow of the ABLA power-plant tower and the crumbling remains of Jane Addams Homes. More »

Khan BBQ was a smoky dingy cabbie joint, with cracked ceramic tile, red plastic bench seating bolted to the floor ala Kentucky Fried Chicken circa 1985, and no air conditioning. On a swampy summer day, with the clay tandoor ovens at full charcoal flame, the solitary rickety general-issue floor fan blew more hot air than a Chicago alderman and offered little relief. A year ago, when I first entered the restaurant, an old man with a prodigious white beard took one look, calculated me as a Devon Street day-tripper, nodded towards Hema’s Kitchen across the street, and said “our food is very spicy.” More »

The modern workday is a Sisyphean collection of personal trials. It starts out with you walking bleary-eyed across the rust-colored iron trusses of the Chicago River bridges, or sweltering in overpacked el cars dodging errant briefcases.

Then there’s the descent into the cubicle, the modern sensory deprivation chamber, a fabric box of Post-it Notes and push pins. This is where you spend your first work hour, checking whether the Cubs finally won a game, flipping through the digital New York Times, or reading the latest blog rant in a state of paranoia reserved for citizens of socialist dictatorial regimes. It’s only a matter of moments before your boss arrives with ridiculous demands. More »

Deep fried foie gras.

Deep fried foie gras.

Two weeks after eating at in Montreal, this is the phrase that still flutters in the back of my consciousness. I can’t get it out of my head. Yeah, sure they deep fry everything nowadays, Snickers bars, Twinkies, pizza, and tacos, but who the hell is foolhardy enough to deep fry something like fattened duck liver? That’s like deep frying pure fat. More »

Historically, the Polish have not fared well at the hand of comedians. We rate somewhere above blondes and just below the Irish as a mocked collective. As a first generation Pole, I regularly suffered jokes and challenges to my intellect. I often responded that Copernicus, Chopin, and Marie Curie were Polish, and that any nation that spawned such cultural icons must have something going for it. More »

Smoked Meat, aka Viande Fume from Schwartz’s Deli

I’ve spent a lot of time waiting in line for food. Last year it was 3.5 hours for life changing oysters and softshell crab at Uglesich’s in New Orleans, and just last week it was a half hour at Hot Doug’s in Chicago seeking French fries poached in duck fat. More »

T-Rex poutine at La Banquise.

America is the land of the obese, the home of McDonald’s, purveyor of deep fried Twinkies, inventor of Buffalo wings, mass consumer of pizza, and yet we still cede our title of supreme imperial culinary hedonism to Canada by not adopting poutine, a cholesterol bomb of French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. More »

If Tony Soprano dropped by looking for a good sandwich, I’d take him to Bari Foods. More »

If a bunch of drunken Mardi Gras interior designers broke into a timber loft and performed an extreme home makeover in the style of French country chateau, the result would be Jerry’s Sandwiches. Gilded antique lamps cast light on shiny tangles of colored beads, the yellow faux plaster paint job, and distressed wooden tables. Feather-bedizened Mardi Gras masks hang above the entrance to the dining room. More »

Queens is changing. Or so I’ve read. I know little about Queens outside of Hollywood’s occasional treatments (Coming to America, Queens Logic). But now, with a fresh set of in-laws who hail from Queens, it seemed prudent to take a day in my recent NYC visit to delve a little into Queens culture. It’s daunting for certain; Queens is enormous. With luck, I could glean at least a morsel of insight into the behemoth of culture and diversity residing in the borough. The itinerary? Explore a little, and of course, eat as much as I could stand in one day. More »

Buffalo Slider with foie gras mayo

Fixture (2706 N. Ashland Ave.), a modestly priced small-plate American restaurant, literally sticks out from its neighbors on a somewhat bleak strip of road. Surrounded by a row of dirtied-by-years-of-Chicago-weather white buildings, its solid black, boxy storefront juts out closer to the street. Had I not already been on my way there for the grand opening party, I would have stopped out of pure curiosity. More »

Like a geographic Rodney Dangerfield, the Midwest gets no respect.

Our culinary consciousness, much like our artistic one, veers to the coasts. Whether it’s the California stylings rooted in locally grown politically vetted food of Chez Panisse or the celebrity studded tables of Mario Batali’s neo-Italian empire in New York, there is often no in-between. More »

Lelolai bakery’s coconut flan

Well, I used to. On a preposterous whim, I asked my folks to get me a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate my college graduation. My dad took me seriously and came through with the trademark bottle - a dark shade of green, almost black, bearing the golden shield marking the house of Moet. I stared at it reverently for almost a year, in two separate apartments, as an unmistakable talisman of the fine things to come. More »

If you were binging on absinthe and someone dropped you in the alleyway of a Beijing brothel, it would probably be pretty akin to dining at Opera restaurant in Chicago’s South Loop. More »

La Sardine’s Bouillabaisse

I never met an organ meat I didn’t like.

This has become my eating mantra. It makes me sound like a culinary bad ass and makes the chicks swoon. Food network chicks anyway. More »

I never met a Whopper, a Chalupa, or a Slider that I didn’t like. When it comes to fast food, I am either fearless or profoundly stupid. I am allergic to nothing. Add this to the fact that I have a low tolerance for alcohol and a fairly casual attitude about what constitutes a proper meal, I am a cheap date. More »