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[From the 3/20/25 Amateur Gourmet Newsletter] On Tuesday we went with our friends Henry and Chris to Bangkok Supper Club in the West Village. The food was so good! Zippy and extremely flavorful. The highlights were these chicken wings that had an electric citric acid-like powder on them: The pork jowl that came on garlic…

[From the 7/11/25 newsletter] Just like asparagus has a season, so does eating out at restaurants and that season is now. Sure, it’s lovely to walk into a little French bistro on a snowy day in the dead of winter, but it’s also lovely to cook soup at home in the dead of winter. Not…

[From the 7/21/25 newsletter] We went with our friends Chris and Lance to the newly revamped Fedora on Friday night and had a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to drink less since my Parkinson’s diagnosis, but my doctor says I can drink “moderately,” so when everyone ordered the signature martini, I didn’t want to…

The West Village is not an easy place to grab a cheap lunch. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a wonderful place to grab lunch. There’s Market Table, ‘ino, Pearl Oyster Bar, The Spotted Pig, Barbuto, etc, etc, and so on. But the operative word in my first sentence was “cheap” and while all of those…

You may recall that on our recent trip to New Orleans, we enjoyed something called a Sno-Ball. We ate this Sno-Ball at a place called Hansen’s Sno-Bliz and though I was wary at first–“isn’t it just ice and syrup?”–I was quickly won over by the texture of that ice and the intense flavor of that…

The first meal that you cook in a new apartment is very, very important. We all remember what happened last time, don’t we? I attempted to inaugurate our Park Slope apartment three years ago with Edna Lewis’s fried chicken (fried in butter and lard) and didn’t get the fat hot enough. The result? Gooey, gloppy,…