• Whitefish Salad

    Whitefish Salad

    Bagels are my madeline; one bite and a lifetime’s worth of poppy seeds and bad breath spill forth. I’ve written much about bagels on the web–this tribute to Bagelworks in Boca Raton, a bagel love letter for Serious Eats–but I’ve written very little about a bagel topping that’s been a constant in my life and…

  • Is this better?

    For those of you who told me to resize my pictures, my wonderful design team–Leah & Justin–walked me through the process and now we can compare the results. This is how a picture used to appear on my site: And this is what it looks like when I resize it in iPhoto to have a…

  • A Modest Proposal

    A Modest Proposal

    We approached The River Cafe with trepidation. “Shhhh,” I told Craig. “They could be outside.” “They won’t hear us,” he said. “You’re being ridiculous.” Was I? You see my parents arrived at The River Cafe at 8 pm with Michael, my brother, and his girlfriend Tali in the same car. The plan was that Michael…

  • Spicy Cauliflower Soup & Braised Lobster Mushrooms

    Spicy Cauliflower Soup & Braised Lobster Mushrooms

    How does dinner happen? It happens in many ways. We ask the person we’re with, “What are you in the mood for?” or we just pick up the phone and dial the Thai place down the street or the pizza place around the corner. Or, if we have the ingredients, we make a quick bowl…

  • More on Bourdain

    To answer some of your questions: – We were at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival (see here) and, as stated in that post, we were on our last day of shooting, at the Mario Batali Jamie Oliver dinner at Danny Devito’s restaurant. My director and I, exhausted from all the interviews we’d done,…

  • Food Tastes Better When It Has a Good Story

    Food Tastes Better When It Has a Good Story

    We ask many things of our food. We ask that our food is clearly identifiable (anything strange and murky immediately turns us off); we ask that our food is reasonably healthy–even if that means laying a redemptive tomato on a greasy, heart-crushing 5-pound burger. We ask that our food is prepared in a clean kitchen,…

  • St. Patrick’s Day: A Deli Throwdown (by Justin The Intern)

    Remember our interns? Justin has a story about St. Patrick’s Day and it goes something like this… When St. Patrick’s Day is on a Monday, it’s hard to justify getting ridiculously drunk when you have to be at work the next day. It’s easy to justify eating copious amounts of delicious corned beef and pastrami…

  • A Spontaneous Dumpling Tasting at Rickshaw

    My mom tells the story of her Uncle Manny who stunned her, as a young girl, out at Chinese restaurant when he told the waitress: “Bring whatever’s good” without even glancing at the menu. I remember hearing that story as a kid and thinking nothing could be more lavish than shirking a menu and all…

  • Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon

    Bone Marrow at Blue Ribbon

    When people ask me, “How do you come up with stuff for your blog all the time?” I have a ready-made answer: “Camera.” “Camera?” “Yes,” I say. “I try to carry a camera everywhere I go” (sometimes at my own peril) “and then if I eat something notable or I stumble into somewhere notable I…

  • Richard Blais

    Anyone who watched the season premiere of “Top Chef” yesterday will have taken notice of Richard who charged out of the gate with his deep dish peach pizza and finished the episode in the top four. What you may not know is that one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had in my life…