the ulterior epicure

Mahoney’s
New Orleans, Louisiana

At Mahoney’s, you stake your own table and wait.

And, wait. And wait. And wait.

They take their time making po’boys here.  Having just experienced the machine-like efficiency of the Parkway Bakery & Tavern, our half-hour wait at Mahoney’s seemed like an unreasonably long time.  We thought they forgot our order.

But in all other respects, this is one instance where the consensus seems to have gotten it right: Mahoney’s Po’Boy Shop makes good po’boys.

Continue reading ‘review: call ahead, the wait might kill you…’

Parkway Bakery & Tavern
New Orleans, Louisiana

Good, fried chicken you can get in many places. The same is probably true for po’boys.

But, whereas fried chicken claims its home all over the South (and in a few, isolated pockets around the country, including Stroud’s, which is in my backyard), an authentic po’boy, like a muffalata, is, arguably, best experienced in New Orleans.

It was with this thought in mind that I crossed off the much-applauded Willie Mae’s Scotch House from my crammed dining itinerary in favor of sampling two of New Orlean’s most well-regarded po’boy restaurants.

Continue reading ‘review: po’boy crawl…’

Cochon Butcher
New Orleans, Louisiana

Apparently, a trip to New Orleans is an obligatory race to see how many calories one can intake, how high one can boost their cholesterol, in the course of their stay.  The only prize is the satisfaction of one’s own gluttony.

My trip happened to be four days short, and it was with four days-worth of cream, butter, pork fat, and bourbon coursing through my veins that I decided to go for the whole hog.

Continue reading ‘review: pig out…’

Stanley
New Orleans, Louisiana

Chef Scott Boswell owns two restaurants in New Orleans. Named after the two lead characters in Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley and Stella! (yes, the exclamation point cleverly included) sit a few blocks apart from each other on Chartres (pronounces “charters”) Street in the French Quarter.

Having had nothing to eat all day except a bag of peanuts and two cocktails, The Hair was starving when we arrived at MSY in the mid-afternoon rain. Dropping our bags off at the hotel – conveniently, located between the two culinary Kowalskis – we met up with our friends Iggy and The Drummer, who had flown in the day before, and headed to Stanley for a snack to tie us over to our late dinner reservation at Stella! that evening.

I’ll get around to Stella! in a subsequent post.  In this one, I focus on Stanley.

Continue reading ‘review: mr. kowalski…’

New Orleans, Louisiana

The Saints beat the Cardinals.

Bourbon Street was as colourful as I remembered it.

We were spared a full day of forecasted rain.

The po’boys were delicious.

I finally got out for a few nice, long runs.

And there was enough pork fat and coffee (and for some, alcohol) to keep even the grumpiest traveler happy.

Overall, my recent, extended weekend in The Big Easy was a good one.

My friends (this time, traveling with four others: Iggy and her husband The Drummer; Houston, whom you all have met before on this blog; and The Hair) left the dining itinerary up to me.

Continue reading ‘travel: laissez les bons temps rouler…’

Arthur Bryant’s
Kansas City, Missouri

Wilbert Harrison made Kansas City a singable destination in 1959 when his version of the song “Kansas City” topped both the R&B and Billboard charts.  The song not only earned him a place in the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame (posthumously in 2001), but also would come to be counted among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock & Roll.

The song’s popularity caught on with other artists.  Fats Domino sang a version, and so did the Beatles.* In 2005, the song was adopted as Kansas City’s official song.
Continue reading ‘i’m goin’ to kansas city…’

7-Layer Coconut Cake
Frank Stitts

About a month ago, the hostess of the new year’s eve dinner party to which I had been invited (touted to be one of the most exclusive and sought-after invitations among some) dropped a subtle hint. Her husband was coconutty.

Much to the horror of some, I like a bit of a challenge when it comes to host gifts. Unless I’m terribly arrested, I prefer not to pluck my gifts, prepackaged, from the shelf.

No wine. No cheese. No tinned cans of nuts or baskets of fruit.

So, for this occasion, I canvassed my ever-expanding library of cookbooks for a coconut cake recipe. Continue reading ‘recipe: coconutty…’

Fresh Fig and Goat Cheese Salad
Union J, Hong Kong

In 2006, I met Eric Johnson, then executive chef at Jean Georges Shanghai, inadvertently. Though we had exchanged a few emails, I hadn’t anticipated that he’d call me out when I visited the restaurant unannounced. We kept in touch loosely over the subsequent years.

Serendipitously, Johnson popped up in my life again this summer during a casual conversation with Johnny Iuzzini, the Executive Pastry Chef of Jean Georges, about our upcoming travel plans (he, just back from Spain on this way to Italy, and I, about to leave for Hong Kong). Johnny told me that Eric had left Jean Georges Shanghai, taking the pastry chef, Jason Casey (who had worked under Iuzzini), with him to open a restaurant called Union J, in Hong Kong.  I should check it out.

Continue reading ‘review: expatriate…’

Snow-bound.

Happy (belated) new year, friends near and far!

The first order of business, always, is to set the agenda.

Due to a project I’m working on, I don’t expect to be doing as much travel in the first half of 2010. In fact, I’ve only scheduled three trips for the entire year.  And two of those are, at this point, tentative and vaguely sketched.

But I refuse to live without a wish list.  Or, at least a plan of study.  I can already tell you that I won’t make it to all of these destination (unless a winning lottery ticket happens to land on my doorstep, or I discover that I’m the heir to a long-lost branch of one of America’s great Robber Barons), but I sure will try my best to knock off a good half of them: Continue reading ‘where do we go from here?….’