In the heart of Harlem, a new restaurant called Red Rooster is quietly making waves. During a recent visit to the Big Apple, I decided to make the journey uptown to Lenox Avenue to check out the comfort-food restaurant launched by Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit fame. I was hugely impressed, both with the quality of the food and the total experience.
The cupcake boom was alive and well when I was first in Chicago four years ago. There was Sprinkles, Swirlz, Sugar Bliss…and of course, there was Molly’s. I especially love Molly’s. I truly love Molly’s. Molly’s was a five minute walk away from my apartment when I lived in Chicago and I definitely had a love hate relationship with it. I loved it for the little pick-me-ups whenever I needed (or wanted) one, but of course hated that my then expanding waistline was in no small part attributable to my love of the delectable concoctions at Molly’s Cupcakes.
If you are a fan of US television series and movies, you will be familiar with New York’s obsession with brunch. Brunch features so prominently in movies and TV shows based in New York that I knew it had to be among one of the first things I tried here. I have always wanted to have brunch with my girl pals Sex and the City style, talking about any and everything under the sun…and Sarabeth’s is a definitive top pick! Continue Reading →
La Mar is a restaurant that I first visited in Lima in the summer of 2009. I remember this place clearly because when I went with my classmates, we very coincidentally ran into other classmates who were also touring Peru at the same time. By that point on the trip, my friends had brought me to so many restaurants that I had already recognised Peru as an undiscovered gastronomic haven: they have over thirty types of corn and so many kinds of fruit that I had never encountered. Not to mention a huge number of stunning fusion dishes, a direct result of Peru’s many immigrant cultures. La Mar has restaurants throughout Latin America and has recently started expanding into the USA. Continue Reading →
Two years ago, I bought a Belgian waffle iron purely on the strength of Molly’s post recommending two outstanding waffle recipes, Marion Cunningham’s yeast-raised one and the Food Network’s Waffles of Insane Greatness (WIG). Prior to reading Molly’s post, I had never considered making waffles at home. Waffles weren’t even high on my list of favourite breakfast (or dessert) dishes. Today, waffles are permanent fixtures on my breakfast repertoire. Continue Reading →
Okay… I’ll admit it. I was actually a huge fan of the fusion food movement when it first emerged in the 1990s. But I think that’s also because my first experiences with fusion food — or East-West cuisine — were with chefs whose abilities to pair ingredients from the Orient and the Occident were actually (especially in retrospect) pretty exceptional. I’m talking about guys like Peter Gordon and Roy Yamaguchi. And while fusion became a bad word for a while, because of a whole slew of not-so-talented chefs who threw ingredients together without really understanding them, today, combining products and ingredients from around the world has become standard fare for many of our most celebrated chefs. But what’s important to understand is that way before someone decided to label East-West cuisine, it existed. One of my favourite early fusion dishes, and admittedly one of the oddest, is taco rice. Continue Reading →
The first time I paid attention to the word ‘quiche’ was way back in the early eighties, and I did not even know how to pronounce it then. It was from the title of a book, countless copies of which were stacked on a table as I entered a Barnes & Noble store in Fox Hills Mall in Culver City, California. Continue Reading →
When my girlfriend K and I were college students living on the fringes of New York’s scenic West Village, there were two kinds of restaurants that we enjoyed frequenting. The first kind is the so-called ‘superstar’ type — this is the kind that has received widespread media coverage and whose chef clearly has his finger on the gustatory pulse of the city. The second kind of restaurant is the neighborhood joint. These are eateries which have won us over with their hearty food and good service, and which are typically a short stroll from our apartments. Joseph Leonard, happily, is a restaurant that falls into both categories. Continue Reading →
I love a good Clams Casino. It’s a lovely retro dish that I happen to adore but is quite hard to find these days. If you’ve never had a really good version, with fresh, plump, sweet clams and topped with parmesan, bacon (hey, who doesn’t love bacon?), oregano, parsley, bell peppers, shallots, and garlic, you don’t know what you’re missing! Continue Reading →
One Saturday morning in late January, while visiting friends in San Francisco, we decided to take a day trip to Berkeley. While we had several reasons for going there, one of the most important was to check out some of that area’s most highly-regarded eating places. I asked my friends, some of whom knew the area well, for recommendations on where we should go to — after all, I was the tourist and they were the locals. While there were a lot of options thrown around for lunch, dinner and snacks in between, everyone agreed on where we should have breakfast. They all said Rick and Ann’s. Continue Reading →
Soooo, here we go! This is our first post and we are elated to bring our nomad suitcases full of recipes to the Chubby Hubby e-abode. We can’t think of a better way to start than to bring you along on our summer adventures, which for your enjoyment (and ours, quite evidently) will take place in our home countries. Call it “The Kitchen Nomads go back home” if you will! I (Paola) will be introducing you to the concept of double deep-frying and the variety of Colombian cuisine, while Jessica will entice you with the beauty of using more butter than you need to and the freshness of summer fruit in France. Continue Reading →