Victuals I have known

Personal top ten lifetime restaurant meals (so far).

Tie for first place:

-- 2004 Summer tasting menu at Babbo -- New York City

-- Barbecue sandwich with slaw + sweet iced tea at Allen and Sons -- Chapel Hill, NC

THE REST...

(3) Roast chicken with fall vegetables, Chez Panisse -- Berkeley, California

(4) Blue Hill at Stone Barns Offal Supper with guest chef Fergus Henderson (he cooks with parts most people throw away - VERY successfully) -- Pocantico Hills, NY

(5) The clam-and-bacon pie at Sally's Pizzeria -- New Haven, CT

(6) Salt-and-pepper crab at the R&G Lounge -- San Francisco, CA

(7) Roast chicken with cold green bean salad -- La Rotisserie d'en Face, Paris

(8) Cambodian/Vietnamese soups and noshes at Phnom Penh -- Vancouver, British Columbia

(9) The pastrami sandwich at Katz's Deli -- New York City

(10) The corned beef at the old Second Avenue Deli -- New York City (haven't tried them in their new location)

You may have noticed that two of my all-time favorite meals were roast chicken. Yes, I noticed too. I like simple stuff done well in addition to complex stuff done fussily and often in preference to it. :-)

Daydreaming of beignets

At Uber-Chowhound Jim Leff's blog, guestblogger Paul Trapani foodblogs New Orleans: Parts One, Two and Three.

Thought for the day

Parisian food critic François Regis Gaudry, writing in L’Express: “Americans in a bistro are like ladybugs in a garden, a sign of its rude good health.”

(cited in Alexander Lobrano's fantastic recent series of NYT blog posts on dining out in New York and Paris)

Ezra Pound Cake

New on the blogroll: Ezra Pound Cake:

Prior to starting Ezra Pound Cake in March 2008, I was head pastry chef at a German bakery in my hometown. Before that, I spent 10 years as a professional writer. Now, I use my master’s in English strictly to come up with badass blog names.

I write Ezra Pound Cake to chronicle my life, share recipes and encourage people to cook real food.

(Via Serious Eats.)

Lunch at the Red Hook soccer field on Sunday

Dining al fresco, from the food trucks surrounding the Red Hook soccer field in Brooklyn, NY:

lunch at the redhook ballfields on sunday
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Pictured: Dave, Melissa, Max and Carrie (l-r) sample pupusas, tacos, grilled corn, and various tasty beverages, including horchata and agua de tamarindo.

(Max travels with his own Cheerios and crackers, which were not on offer from the trucks.)

It's really all about the dan dan noodles

New York City now has many "Chinatown" neighborhoods... but for foodies, the consensus-best Chinatown is in Flushing, Queens:

Everything tastes different in Flushing, Queens, the best neighborhood in New York for tasting the true and dazzling flavors of China. The dumplings are juicier here, the noodles springier, the butter cookies flavored with a bit of salty green seaweed, as a cookie at a French bakery might be sprinkled with fleur de sel. The perfume of roasted Sichuan peppercorns and the sound of dough slapping against countertops lures visitors down to the neighborhood’s subterranean food malls, where each stall consists of little more than a stove and a specialty: slow-cooked Cantonese healing soups; fragrant, meaty Sichuanese dan dan noodles; or Fujianese wontons, no bigger than a nickel, that spread their fronds in clear broth.

[...]

The shift means that the food of Flushing now includes dishes that don’t fit many American notions of Chinese food: griddle-baked sesame bread from China’s large Muslim minority, potato-eggplant salad from Harbin in the northeast, Beijing-style candied fruit, and grilled lamb skewers, from China’s long-unreachable western frontier near Kazakhstan. There is now a mind-bending variety of noodles and dumplings: the flour foods, (mian shi in Chinese), those wheat-based staples that feed China’s north and west, as rice traditionally feeds the southeast. (The Yangtze River is the divider.)

Let The Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing, NY (New York Times, 30 July 2008)

One for the road

My Last Supper: Famous Chefs and Their Final Meals

Hat tip: Carrie

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