One of the two or three best Bolivian places around and more consistent than most. Right now this is perhaps my favorite Silpancho. The chef is from Santa Cruz, which doesn’t seem to make a huge difference, but it is a slight variation on the Cochabamba emphasis in all the other places. They still have mostly Cochabamba dishes, though some of the other meats and small bready dishes are more in the Argentinean direction. Beware: it can fill up and get crowded on weekends, leading to waits, so go fairly early. It is also slightly “nicer” than most area Bolivian restaurants, yet without feeling sterile or overdone. So this one I can definitely recommend.
Which raises a delicate question: Having already eclipsed Paris in Michelin stars, could Tokyo chefs one day eclipse the French at their own cuisine?
I put the question to pastry chef Sugino, who trained in France and is one of only four Japanese members of the prestigious Relais Desserts, an association of the world’s top pastry makers who meet regularly to exchange ideas.
Choosing his words carefully, he notes that pastry shops in France are having difficulty finding young people willing to put in the time and effort required to learn the craft. He also says that even top French patisseries are now taking shortcuts — by using stabilizers in their desserts, for instance.
“They are losing the basics,” Sugino says. “It is possible that, 10 or 20 years from now, the French will have lost the art of pastry but that it will live on in Tokyo, in Japan.”
Genoa is one of the best food venues in Italy, as is Liguria more generally. It is also one of the best places in Europe for vegetarian dining. Maximize the number of tarts and vegetable tarts you eat, skip hotel breakfast and look for small places with morning snacks, preferably baked goods, and treat them as the equal of cooked dishes. Forget about meat altogether.
1. Antica Sciamadda, 14-16 Via San Giorgio, arrive at the 11:30 opening and keep on buying the tarts and farinata as they are freshly baked and put out on the counter. There is a vaguely Arabic feel to the dishes, and there is an excellent video of the place here. There are many excellent “sciamadda” in Genoa and they lie somewhere between a food stall and a very small restaurant, so do not count on them being open for dinner.
2. Trattoria alle Due Torri, Salita del Prione 53, near the Columbus house. Order pasta and focaccia, this is some of the best spaghetti I’ve had, and the pansotti (ravioli in walnut sauce) is notable.
3. La Rina, superb seafood restaurant, don’t focus on the main courses.
Hookah, but lots of Lebanese food too, including all the classics and also a variety of sandwiches. Consistently good, this is one of the best in the area for Middle Eastern. It has maybe my favorite hummus around. You also have the very best views of Baileys Crossroads when you look out the window. I didn’t expect much when I walked in here, as it looks like neither a “nice restaurant” nor the right kind of “mom and pop,” but I can give this place quite a good recommendation.
The premise of this book is that cooking — defined broadly enough to take in the whole spectrum of techniques people have devised for transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and rink — is one of the most interesting and worthwhile things we do.
This is a highly thoughtful book, and I enjoyed the lengthy discussion of fermentation and fermented foods. My favorite puzzle posed is the question of why fermented foods are so frequently matters of acquired taste across cultures. Yet overall the book is missing a sharpness of argumentation or novelty of perspective which I look for in works of this kind. You can order the book here. Here is a useful Laura Miller review of the book. Here is a NYT review. Here is Mark Bittman coverage. Here is an excerpt from the book.
When author Anita Stewart first heard about the Canadian government’s new food truck parked in Mexico City, she laughed so hard she cried. The new Canada-branded, taxpayer-funded venture, which kicked off its three-week pilot project last week, is serving up a Mexican-ized version of poutine, using Oaxaca cheese instead of curds. Also on the menu are Alberta beef tourtière, and maple-glazed Albacore tuna.
The truck is trying to draw attention to Canadian products such as McCain French fries, and promote the ‘Canada Brand’ in Mexico.
Here is more, via @RGrier88. By the way, I enjoyed this paragraph:
“Some of our initial research in Mexico to support the Canada Brand found that only 35% of Mexicans were able to associate Canada to a particular food product, with fish and maple syrup being the most cited,” Patrick Girard, a spokesperson for Agriculture Canada, wrote in an email Wednesday to the Post.
That said, whenever I travel to Canada, I feel I am entering quite a distinct food culture (city by city), it simply is a little hard to define upfront.
Real Beijing street food. Mostly kabobs (with Chinese spices) and dumplings, though the cold dishes are good too. I count 38 different forms of dumpling, including lamb, chicken, mushroom, bean curd and cabbage, and many other options in various combinations and manifestations. Their “Tofu Prime Products” are excellent too. These are the best dumplings around and this place should immediately be considered essential dining. It has no close substitute in this area and in terms of quality and price it is excellent.
Via Jacob A. Geller, the evidence is now in and it seems to suggest no, food deserts are not a real problem:
Here is more, and here is the study itself. If you look at the statistical tables, they’re pretty striking. Even where there is statistical significance — which is the exception to the rule — the size of the effect is so tiny, it’s like practically nothing. For example, on the margin, adding one full-service supermarket within a one-mile radius of your house is associated with an average BMI decrease in your neighborhood of .115. That is a difference of just one pound. (See back-of-the-envelope calculations here.)
So there is really no relationship, according to this one recent study of nearly 100,000 Californians, between the distance between your body and a full-service supermarket (or any other kind of food store), and whether or not you are obese. Distance, which is a proxy for access (the idea of a food desert is that the nearest supermarket, which has fresh produce, is distant), is for all practical purposes a non-factor.
Here is a good example:
For example, when you last ordered food at McDonald’s, did you even notice those ten salads on the menu? Did you order them? No, and me neither. And did you ask for a cup of water, which is free, instead of a soda? No again. (That’s my experience anyway, and that of millions of other Americans.)
And an excellent parallel:
And what’s interesting from a political standpoint, is that this analysis similarly applies to drugs — tackling the supply side does little for heroin addicts, for example, increases the price of heroin, which induces supply to come back into line with the addicts’ inelastic demand curve — and yet most liberals would probably agree with me that drug addiction ought to be tackled on the demand side (spending money to convince young people not to shoot up heroin for example, instead of spending money on patrolling the border), but the same liberals who agree with this analysis of the drug war will often turn around and favor unproven supply-side solutions to obesity like subsidizing supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods, despite the absence of evidence to support those ideas. Note that libertarians are more consistent on those issues — they oppose supply-side interventions in most, if not all, illicit drug markets, and also oppose supply-side interventions into food markets.
Run by a Turk, with an oddly yuppie feel, extremely noisy, but still some of the very best Mexican food in Virginia. The chile relleno is the real thing. High standards of quality. Recommended, especially if you get there early. It tastes truly fresh, though the prices are not so cheap. Currently they seem to be opening at 4:30 and not taking reservations, we’ll see if that policy persists.
A new Bangladeshi place, now up and running — sort of — and suddenly one of my very favorite area restaurants. During their first few months they served only biryanis, and those were a clear first best in the area. Now they have an entire menu. The thing to do is go with four people and ask for all of their best dishes. You should get around eight courses for about $30 per head. The breads, curries, and odds and ends are all first-rate and original at that. It reminds me of the early days of Thai X-Ing. It is also one of the two or three cheapest places on this whole list.
Highly recommended, right now this is one of the places to frequent. Note they only have a few tables, and the kitchen is slow in any case.
