Whenever I travel overseas, I inevitably experience something that I call the “evil glint” food encounter. A friendly native will offer me an opportunity to try some of their food. It’s a perfectly pleasant encounter at first, and then the native gets an evil glint in his/her eye, and realizes that it would be highly […]
Read More >>Archive for June, 2011
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The guys at Yemen Café in Brooklyn don’t mess around: before we even had a chance to think about what we wanted to order, an efficient, non-communicative waiter slammed two bowls of soup, a few pieces of lemon, something resembling a fresh tomato salsa, a pair of salads topped with more of the salsa, and […] Read More >> |
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On a ferry from Trinidad to Venezuela a few years ago, I met a twentysomething Venezuelan soccer coach who had just returned from a yearlong stint in Cuba. As soon as we started talking about Cuba, I (of course) mentioned how much I love Cuban food, especially ropa vieja (“old clothes”, beef simmered with onions, […] Read More >> |
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Conclusive proof that I’m a dork: I stayed up until about 2:00 a.m. a few nights ago, trying to figure out whether Massawa, a popular “Ethiopian” restaurant near Columbia University, is owned by Ethiopians or Eritreans. I’d been told by several Ethiopians and Eritreans (most notably by the owners of Dahlak, a desperately underrated Eritrean […] Read More >> |
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One of the unintended consequences of my little food project is that I’ve spent a lot of time face-to-face (or face-to-hoof, or face-to-pork-rind) with my food hang-ups. Every once in a while, I’m reminded of how the food culture works in Iowa, where I grew up. We were raised to believe that there are exactly […] Read More >> |
