Apologies for the lack of posts over the past couple weeks. I've been traveling, culinarily of course.
On my recent road trip from Seattle to San Francisco I had some solid meals, saw some beautiful scenery, and drank A LOT of wine.
Between stops in the Willamette Valley, Sonoma, and Napa Valley one winery really stood out, however. Not necessarily for the quality of their wine and certainly not for the beauty of their facilities but for their down-to-earth approach to wine. This is not down...
A few days ago I posted about absinthe, that misunderstood green spirit reputed to cause dementia and illegal in this country until just last year. As much fun as writing about absinthe is, there are individuals far more qualified than myself who can offer much deeper and more authoritative insights. After all, I’m neither mixologist, nor art historian, nor psychologist, and there’s enough to be said about absinthe to fill volumes.
Instead, I’d like offer some advice for young people, specif...
I was out to dinner in Durham, North Carolina with three friends several days ago when an incident occurred that got me thinking about why people eat (and don’t eat) certain things.
The restaurant in question is called Watts Grocery and has quickly built a reputation around serving updated takes on classic Southern cuisine using local ingredients. The place is about as unpretentious as it gets, a great neighborhood spot where the staff greet you by name and you’re bound to see someone you k...
For the past two years I’ve run an underground dining club out of my on-campus apartment at Duke called Z Kitchen. This post isn’t so much about Z Kitchen as it is about the birth of a dish that I serve there.
There’s a lot of discussion in the food world about “culinary plagiarism.” Broadly defined, it’s copying the dish of another chef and serving it as your own. This is generally regarded as pretty lame across the board, but it’s a particularly touchy topic among chefs in the hypermod...
Nearly everyone I know has at least one crazy absinthe story.
Whether running drunkenly through the streets of Prague after a few too
many Absinthe No. 2’s during a semester abroad or, in my case, first
drinking the spirit out of a Scope bottle smuggled back from Europe,
absinthe stories make for prime cocktail party fodder.
The licorice-flavored spirit is filled with lore and romance but isalso gravely misunderstood. My absinthe bender did not result in myseeing the fabled Green Fairy but r...
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