Breakfast in LA

Food, U.S.A.

Apr 252009

I’m normally a cereal-for-breakfast kind of guy. I stock my cubicle cabinets with multiple varieties of corn flakes and wheat thingies, and alternate them on a daily basis. But not when I’m home visiting my parents in LA.

There, I eat things like spicy goat bone marrow soup, with all the hanging layers of fat, muscle, tendons in tact. Yes, for breakfast. It’s really delicious. There’s hardly any meat, and the idea is you sop up the goodness that comes out of the bone marrow and mixes with the broth for several hours (overnight ) and sop it up with some simple thin, homemade roti (flatbread). Since it’s just broth and bread (and tendons and things), it doesn’t even feel that heavy. It’s just spicy and good.

But yes, it’s not cereal of eggs or pancakes, but the idea of breakfast in Bangladesh is very different from here. There, you eat a full breakfast to fuel you for all the manual labor you’ll be doing, anything from cutting bricks to hand-picking rice from paddies from sunrise to sunset. It’s hard to do that if all you ate were syrup and waffles.

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One Night in Nashville

Food, ON THE ROAD, U.S.A.

Jan 092009

Us New Yorkers were debating whether there was a need to “go out” in Nashville, Tennessee. We had just consumed a luxurious meal at F. Scott’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar where seared scallops cooked in barbecue sauce was consumed (¡nunca máis!) along with some type of ordinary fish cooked rather ordinarily. It’s amazing how spoiled you become living in The City where even the finest restaurant anywhere else in the world is, well, “ordinary” (apologies to anyone outside of NYC reading this, but one cannot tell a lie).

But the live jazz music seeping out of the bar area into the dark corner of the restaurant where we were placed with a clientele of grandmothers and great-great-aunts was good. Too bad it was over by the time we had finished eating.

F. Scott’s owner was a big fan of the famous writer the restaurant is named after, but she wanted it call it Zelda’s (which I agree is a much sexier name) after the author’s wife. However, that name was already taken. I’ll admit the restaurant’s name was one of was my deciding factors (I’ve also dined at the excellent Hemingway ‘s in Killington, Vermont) and because J. Kerouac Diner & Bistro had prematurely died in a car crash.

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Our motel in Music Row was within walking distance of the Nashville nightlife epicenter, so we drove the half a mile to the famed Tootsies Orchid Lounge, which the New York Times characterized as “[a] rowdy country dive [that] has been a Nashville tradition since the days when the Grand Ole Opry was still performing in the Ryman Auditorium around the corner.” It sounded like the logical place to find the natives in their familiar surroundings. Continue reading »

Meeting My Maker

Food, ON THE ROAD, U.S.A.

Dec 272008

One of the highlights of Kelly and my current road trip through the American South has been the Maker’s Mark distillery tour. We had grand aspirations of covering a majority of the American Whiskey Trail, most of it dotted along the Tennessee and Kentucky borders, but several factors, including time constraints, shitty weather and the impending arrival of Christmas led us to abandon all others and go straight to the king of bourbon.

I had never tasted whiskey until I moved to New York City for college in 2001, after which I tried really hard to get into alcohol. I was going though my Bukowski/Kerouac phase, so I considered it of the utmost importance that I find a suitable drink that matched my riotous and rebellious East Village attitude. Continue reading »

A Southern Barbecue Experience

Food, ON THE ROAD, U.S.A.

Dec 232008

At age 27, I’m ashamed to admit as a fanatic carnivore, I’ve never had proper barbecue until today. Sure, I’ve been around it, smelled it. sampled it. I was even fortunate enough to attend the Big Apple BBQ festival as a member of the press a couple of years ago. The greatest barbecue chefs from all over the country gathered at Madison Square Park and fed me to my heart’s content, for gratis! But I wouldn’t even count that as a proper barbecue experience.

The big problem is I don’t eat pork, which of course, is the centerpiece to any barbecue. I used to avoid it for religious reasons but now since I’m not used to the taste, I just don’t enjoy it as much as beef or lamb or any other red or white meat. So I’ve always ate around barbecues, loading up on collard greens and macaroni and cheese and nibbling at a couple of riblets at a friend’s barbecue for the sake of being polite. Continue reading »

Restaurant Almacén Secreto

ARGENTINA, Food

Nov 152008

Balconies in San Telmo, Buenos Aires.

We didn’t know what to expect with a place like Patagonia. It may have been an odd choice to head to the Southern Patagonian Ice Field at the start of winter, but we didn’t care. We wanted to see Patagonia and we had two weeks of vacation to do it.

Fourteen hours of air travel took us from New York City to Buenos Aires, where we decided to spend one night catching our breaths. Kelly had heard about a “secret” restaurant while buying maps at Longitude Books in New York City. The Map Store Guy had just returned from a trip to Buenos Aires and was so excited about it that he pulled out his digital camera and showed her some of the photographs.
Continue reading »