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businessweekme · 6 years

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California Highway 1 Road Trip

Six weeks ago, Highway 1 fully reopened in Big Sur, following devastating mudslides in May 2017. After $54 million worth of repairs and the removal of millions of tons of earth, rocks, and debris, travelers can once again enjoy an uninterrupted drive along the gorgeous coastal highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

But it’s not just the views that make the trek one of the most famous road trips in the world. There’s also the food to contend with: Dotted along the winding route, you’ll find peppery smoked-fish tacos, juicy burgers smothered in eggs and melted cheese, and homemade doughnuts oozing with jelly.

Our version of this journey begins in Point Reyes Station, north of San Francisco. There, you’ll want to stock up on triple cream Mt Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery and scarf as many straight-from-the-bay oysters as you can get down. Your eating adventure will continue from there—you’d better start hungry.

Point Reyes

Side Street Kitchen

The specialty at this year-old, bright, modern diner is the crispy skinned rotisserie chicken, fragrant with herbs and served half or whole with an array of sauces, including curried yogurt, salsa verde, and chimichurri rojo. The other specialty: puffy, sugar-coated, fruit-filled apple fritters. 60 4th St., Point Reyes Station

The Boat Oyster Bar

Hog Island Oyster Co. is famed for the oysters it pulls out of the bay and supplies to top dining rooms around the country. A reservation-only café on the water features those world-class bivalves; the menu changes often, but it frequently includes Hog Island’s singular kumamotos. You can get a dozen raw for $36; even better are the barbecued ones, grilled and dripping with chipotle bourbon garlic butter. 20215 Shoreline Highway, Marshall

Half Moon Bay Area

La Costanera

Peruvian food is having a moment in the U.S., and La Costanera, with its wall of windows overlooking the water from a second-floor dining room, has been recognized by Michelin’s Bib Gourmand. The menu has a mix of classics such as antichuchos (grilled skewers) with marinated beef heart and pork belly; empanadas; tender beer-braised lamb shank; and lomo saltado (beef tenderloin with onions, soy sauce, and a fried egg, if you want one). 8150 Cabrillo Highway, Montara

Dad’s Luncheonette

Chef Scott Clark used to cook at San Francisco’s Michelin-three-starred Saison. He’s transformed a red-painted train caboose into a cozy, wood-lined diner with a small menu of comfort food favorites. The $12 hamburger sandwich has melted cheese, a soft egg, and red onion pickles on grilled white bread; the mushroom version substitutes maitakes for the grass-fed beef. 225 Cabrillo Highway South, Half Moon Bay

Sam’s Chowder House

Seafood makes up almost the entire menu at Sam’s, including a “Captains Platter” of oysters, clams, shrimp, poke, and ceviche; an appetizer of grilled sardines; steamed clams (with the option of linguine); and lobster rolls, “naked” with butter or “dressed” with aioli. At night, the place highlights fresh catches such as Pacific swordfish and local halibut. The seats on the deck offer a panoramic ocean view. 4210 Cabrillo Highway, Half Moon Bay

Hop Dogma Brewing Co.

The rotating array of craft brews at this locally popular beer hall might include Pyro’s Prost chili beer (pilsner brewed with jalapeño); Every Third Inquiry, a Bourbon barrel-aged stout; and the flagship Alpha Dank IPA. Guests can order food from nearby Lamas, a Peruvian and Mexican restaurant, and the tacos, burritos, and arroz con pollo will be delivered to the taproom. 270 Capistrano Rd., Half Moon Bay

Duarte’s Tavern

Dating back to 1894, when Frank Duarte bought the place for $12 in gold, this venerable restaurant specializes in a California version of Continental cuisine. The menu runs the gamut from shrimp cocktail to pork chops with fresh applesauce. The specialties are anything with artichokes, plus the cioppino, packed with clams, shrimp, cod and especially crab, which people drive down from San Francisco to eat. 202 Stage Rd.

Santa Cruz

The Picnic Basket

Set on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, the picturesque luncheonette has an all-day menu with a powerful breakfast selection: golden-brown turnovers stuffed with seasonal fruit or Niman Ranch ham and cheese; an egg-potato-greens frittata sandwich on toast; and house-made jelly doughnuts. Later in the day, hot dogs and elbow macaroni and cheese turn up on the menu. The nearby Penny Ice Creamery, where everything is house-made under the same ownership, is equally popular. 125 Beach St.

Monterey Peninsula

The Meatery

A serious, whole-animal butcher shop with impressive cuts of meat on display, this white-tiled space also serves as a deli. Sandwiches range from a hefty Reuben to banh mi made with caramelized pork belly slices, pickled vegetables, a hit of cilantro, and kewpie mayo on a French roll. A highlight is the house corned beef with sauerkraut on rye. The hot food offerings change daily: On Sundays and Mondays, there’s buttermilk-fried chicken; on Thursdays, visitors line up for the baby back ribs. 1534 Fremont Blvd., Seaside

The Bench Restaurant

Set on the impossibly scenic Pebble Beach Golf Links 18th hole, the Bench has a crowd-pleasing menu that offers all kinds of pizza-styled flatbreads: with pepperoni; with ratatouille, fennel ricotta and heirloom tomatoes; and with bench bacon and grilled, pickled red onion. The 24-ounce short rib, the Smokey Joe, is smoked for 10 hours. Aside from the best views, the outdoor deck has fire-pit tables. 1700 17 Mile Dr., Pebble Beach

Aubergine at l’Auberge Carmel

Chef Justin Cogley operates one of the country’s best under-the-radar fine-dining restaurants. Set in a Relais & Châteaux property, the intimate dining room has a $175 tasting menu that combines local ingredients in unexpected ways: A Morro Bay oyster with caviar has a hit of sea water, and seared abalone is accompanied by romaine lettuce that’s been braised and sliced in thick rounds, with lobster-infused lettuce puree. Monte Verde at 7th Ave., Carmel

Big Sur

Big Sur Bakery & Restaurant

Amid the trees in the hills off the highway, this exceptional café produces terrific pizzas from the wood oven, with a charred, bready, chewy crust and such toppings as creamy greens, mushrooms and tangy taleggio, and red sauce meatballs. The place is first and foremost a bakery: The creamy lemon curd pie in a pistachio crust is addictive, as is any pastry in the display case. 47540 Highway 1

Sierra Mar at Post Ranch Inn

Post Ranch Inn, renowned for its modernist, cliffside, treehouse rooms overlooking the ocean, has a new manager, Gary Obligacion, formerly of Chicago’s celebrated Alinea. The property’s Sierra Mar restaurant is home to one country’s largest wine collections, with 14,000-plus bottles. It complements an elegant four-course tasting menu from which the seared foie gras has a garnish of hazelnuts and king salmon is paired with smoked split peas and sweet apple. 47900 Highway 1

The Sur House at Ventana Big Sur

In 2017, Ventana went through a multimillion-dollar renovation. The renovated Sur House restaurant now has outdoor fireside seating and a bar menu with smoky spice-rubbed chicken wings and open-faced tuna melt accented with pickled fennel. The dinner menu has deceptively simple dishes, such as grilled pork loin on a bed of jalapeño-spiked grits. The wine cellar is also notable: some 10,000 bottles with a focus on the Central Coast. 48123 Highway 1

San Luis Obispo

Ruddell’s Smokehouse

There’s not much barbecue along Highway 1. The notable exception is Ruddell’s, where founder Jim Ruddell set up shop in 2001 in a small building with a few tables outside. The place smokes albacore and salmon with a brown sugar and kosher salt rub; chicken is slow-cooked over hickory. The smoked seafood and poultry are available as tacos in a big French-roll sandwich or salad—and by the pound. 101 D St., Cayucas

Cracked Crab

In the surfing town of Pismo Beach, the unpretentious Cracked Crab has a blazing neon sign and lines stretching out the door. The menu changes according to availability of seafood and features an ocean’s worth of crab: dungeness cocktail with lime and avocado; puck-size, pan-seared lump blue crab cakes; and New England-style lobster rolls stuffed with crab instead. The seafood buckets offer the opportunity to mix and match wild Gulf shrimp, Alaskan crab, clams, mussels, and lobster tails; they go for $61 for one person and $79 for two and come with all the mallets and scissors you’ll need to extract the shellfish. 751 Price St., Pismo Beach

Santa Barbara

Jalama Beach Store & Grill

In Lompoc, the epicenter of Santa Barbara winemaking, is this grill, set inside a store that’s set inside the county park. The specialty is the Jalama burger: It’s quintessential Cali-style, with shredded lettuce, tomato, onions, special sauce, and a griddled bun. The burger has gotten so popular over its almost 40-year history that the name is trademarked. 9991 Jalama Rd., Lompoc

La Super-Rica Tacqueria

Famous for being name-checked by Julia Child, Super-Rica is a cheerful, white-and-turquoise stand with a large selection of options that feature stellar homemade tortillas. The tacos are filled with all kinds of grilled meats—chunks of spiced, brick-colored chorizo; adobado with tender strips of marinated pork. The Super-Rica Especial is made up cheese-stuffed green pasilla chiles that are roasted and draped over tortillas with marinated pork and more cheese, for $6. 622 N. Milpas St., Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara Shellfish Co.

At the end of a dock on the harbor, this photogenic counter started out selling local seafood almost 30 years ago. Customers can still buy fish from commercial fishermen here. (There’s also a robust online store with trays of uni and stone crab claws.) The chopped caesar comes with a choice of grilled, skewered shrimp or sweet scallops. There’s more local shrimp, coated with coconut and crispy fried, garnished with onion rings. Also highly recommended are the linguine studded with garlic-sauteed clams in the shell and the monumental, steamed two-pound crab, along with a selection of local wine and beer by the pitcher. 230 Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara

The Los Angeles Area

Malibu Farm

What started as a pop-up dining room by Helene Henderson in 2013 is now a farmers market-driven restaurant and café on the Malibu Pier, with outposts in Miami and Hawaii. The all-day café at the end of the dock has a lightbulb-lit menu that boasts a pile-up of Swedish pancakes with whipped cream and whatever the seasonal berries are, as well as kale caesar and BLTs with lemon aioli brushed on whole wheat. Down the pier, a slightly more serious version of the restaurant offers a tofu, spinach, and tomato scramble on weekend mornings, and nachos, featuring blue corn chips laden with black beans, melty cheese, and drizzles of sour cream in the evenings. 23000 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

Tallula’s

Chef Jeremy Fox, who heads up the nearby vegetable-focused Rustic Canyon, now puts a creative spin on the Mexi-Cali dining room. In a colorful space decorated with hanging plants, Fox uses exceptional local corn, served Mexican-style with smoky chipotle aioli, and accents black-cod tacos with malt tartar sauce in tender, house-made tortillas. A daily taco special is dreamed up by rotating cooks in the kitchen. The serious bar program features mezcal Manhattans on draft, as well as the obligatory margaritas. 118 Entrada Dr., Santa Monica

Father’s Office

Chef Sang Yoon began serving one of the—if not the—country’s first gourmet burgers almost 20 years ago. The Office Burger is made from freshly ground, dry-aged beef, so it’s got a deep, meaty flavor that’s further accentuated by sweet caramelized onions, bacon, gruyere, and blue cheese. Accompanying fries, standard or sweet potato, are presented in a mini-shopping cart. Father’s Office is equally known for pouring dozens of local craft beers. 1018 Montana Ave., Santa Monica

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whereisfootball · 7 years

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2018 MLS Kit Branding Reimagined

The 2018 Major League Soccer season is nearly underway. It’s been a long offseason and we’re hyped to have it back.

Our friends Tap In have a lot of new, exciting MLS content coming this year on their guide, and in celebration of that, we decided to partner on a fun little project.

In a bid to add a little more personality to what is largely bland, impersonal sponsorship real estate on each kit, we reimagined every team’s jersey with something new in the middle of it. Some of these are local companies, others are prospective partners who have some fun link to the team, and others will probably just be arcane jokes that won’t land.

Nevertheless, we thought this was a fun way to bring a few of our favorite things together: Friendship, Photoshop & American soccer.

Please enjoy.

Atlanta United — Waffle House

An iconic southern restaurant with its roots in Atlanta, Waffle House is open 24/7, 365—and it’s the best. As Waffle House FC will tell you, this is a perfect sponsor for a team that’s tasty on and off the pitch. Their supporters never waver, refusing to shut off for even a single second when they pack the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. They aren’t afraid to do things their own way—which, yes, can sometimes get a bit messy ... but most of the time it’s spot on.

Chicago Fire — Portillo’s

Sorry, it’s important we let you know now that this is probably going to be a food-heavy list as we’re rather fond of eating.

Portillo’s is a Chicago institution known for its hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, and an extremely healthy, 100% good for any diet cheese sauce.

While the Fire aren’t yet a Chicago institution themselves, we hope one day pictures of Bob Bradley, Hristo Stoichkov & Ante Razov will line the walls of a Portillo’s near you.

Colorado Rapids — Coors

The beer with mountains on the can that turn from white to blue when it’s cold enough to drink...

The beer that you knew and loved so well from ages 21-24...

The beer brewed with spring water from the very same Rocky range you can spot from the Colorado Rapids’ 18,000-seat soccer specific stadium...

Headquartered in Golden, Colorado and responsible for some of the best nights of your life, we give you Coors on a Rapids jersey...

“Like if Chelsea’s 1994 kit did a gap year in America.”

Columbus Crew — Wendy’s

As the red-headed stepchild of MLS, this one kind of feels right. And the disappearance of the club would be just as sad as when Wendy’s (founded in Columbus) got rid of their spicy chicken nuggets.

#SAVETHECREW

(Note: The actual kit is pretty great and it’s honestly insulting that we did anything to it. We’re sorry.)

DC United — Geico

The Chevy Chase, Maryland-based Geico gecko had some good years there. We all liked him for a while. It was a good bit. But it got stale right around the time Freddy Adu left town. Since then, DC United and the gecko have struggled mightily to find consistent form. Here’s hoping they both find success this year from a new approach.

(And, hey, while we’re here: All the best to you, Freddy.)

FC Dallas — Dr. Pepper

Everyone’s second team, Dr. Pepper, is a lifestyle in Texas. A Lone Star State-staple that pulls a talented 23-flavor squad from all-over—here’s to you Waco and Dublin— Dr. Pepper is an underrated, over-performing outfit with immense local significance … just like their imagined partner in Dallas.

A lot more to be proud of than their trophy cabinet will tell you.

Houston Dynamo — Swishahouse

As Mike Jones, noted soccer superfan, Swishahouse OG, and Everyone’s Favorite Rapper from 2005, once said:

Let ‘em know: Houston Dynamo.

Good enough for us.

LA Galaxy — SpaceX

Space. Galaxy. You get it.

Headquartered a stone’s throw from the LA Galaxy’s stadium in Carson is SpaceX, Elon Musk’s influential private “outer space things” company as it’s scientifically known.

Much like MLS’s most famous and successful franchise, SpaceX is a trailblazer famous for its glamour and willingness to break the mold. This isn’t to say it’s always smooth sailing—for either—but at the end of the day they’re both respected for their vision and performance.

This crossover is too perfect and it’s something that we’ve seen terrific mockups of in the past (though we wish we knew who to credit!). Also worth a shout is this awesome piece from LA Galaxy Confidential, which mentions Tesla as a fun potential partner.

LAFC — The Boring Company

If the Galaxy is SpaceX, LAFC is The Boring Company.

Elon Musk’s newest endeavor is going to revolutionize Los Angeles by … making tunnels for cars? Oh, and by creating giant vehicles that can travel those tunnels and move lots of people at once … like a train. Hmm. The Boring Company seems like a well-backed but ordinary idea that lacks direction and distinction, with a lot of hype for reasons no one can really explain.

To be blunt, we haven’t really seen much to this point.

The Galaxy have sent a Tesla up into space and revolutionized how we build rockets... but LAFC have so far just made a bunch of flamethrowers and sold out their entire stock. So, we’ll see.

For now, all we’re really sure about is how much better their kit would have looked if they hadn’t put their sponsor in red.

Minnesota United — Prince. Duh.

You can have a Dirty Mind or even be a little Delirious, but you’ll still end up right back here with no Controversy. You can wear it in a Little Red Corvette, in a Purple Rain, When Doves Cry or even put it on Bambi. With this kit, you’ll be a Sexy MF.

Montreal Impact — Cirque du Soleil

What’s wilder than benching Didier Drogba because you’re better without him? One person doing acrobatics on the head of another person while a third person flies through the air holding fire. In French.

Born and headquartered in Quebec, Cirque du Soleil is now the largest theatrical producer in the world. The Impact aren’t even the kings of Canada yet, let alone MLS, but this could be the year they flip their way to the top. Holding fire. In French.

New England Revolution — Sperry’s

Put those Sperry’s on to look the part and take your dad’s boat out on the water. You’ll be as close to Boston as Gillette Stadium and the deck of your boat will probably be as soft as the turf too.

NYCFC — Sbarro.

The Michael-Scott-approved best pizza in New York. The only logical choice.

Sorry, sorry. We’re kidding. Don’t go to Sbarro.

...Let’s try that again...

NYCFC — WeWork.

Much like City Football Group, WeWork is trying to change a model.

For CFG, it’s football clubs. For WeWork, it’s the office space game. WeWork started in New York, born out of an inability to find affordable and available office space in the city—a problem NYCFC knows rather well—and now has an operation that spans across the globe.

Like CFG, it might not be your cup of tea, but it certainly works for a lot of people in NYC and has offered plenty of enterprising young professionals a place to grind. #JackHarrison

New York Red Bulls — Become the MetroStars again.

#Metros4Ever. That is all.

Orlando City — Publix

This one is a no-brainer.

Publix is an employee-owned supermarket chain that serves up some truly delicious food and has fans almost as fanatical as those found on The Wall in Orlando.

Floridians are vocally, passionately, sometimes a bit frighteningly #TeamPublix—and the same can be true for the way purple-clad City supporters get behind their squad.

Philadelphia Union — Wawa

If you know, you know. In their words:

“Wawa is your all day, every day stop for fresh, built-to-order foods, beverages, coffee, fuel services, and surcharge-free ATMs. The stores offer a large fresh food service selection, including Wawa brands such as built-to-order hoagies, freshly brewed coffee, hot breakfast sandwiches, built-to-order specialty beverages, and an assortment of soups, sides and snacks.”

Wawa 4 ever. #SheetzOUT

Portland Timbers — Powell’s

Powell’s City of Books is (supposedly) the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. It is ginormous and fantastic and you should go if you’re ever in Portland.

We don’t know of any football clubs sponsored by book stores, but if there was ever going to be one, it would play in the Rose City.

Real Salt Lake — High West

Tucked away in a state known primarily for its gorgeous vistas and as the home of the Mormon religion is a really wonderful distillery that will knock your socks off. It also comes with that beautiful mountain view, not unlike Rio Tinto Stadium.

San Jose Earthquakes — Yahoo!

Nothing says cool like needing an exclamation point at the end of your name. Kind of like building a brand new stadium and needing to tell people that you have a really long bar.

As the kit sponsor of the Quakes during their two title runs, we think it’s time for Yahoo! to make a return. (Not sure anyone will use it, though.)

Seattle Sounders — Starbucks

Sorry, we’re those guys. Seattle gave the world Starbucks and we needed to see what that logo would look like on these new kits.

Plus, much like Starbucks invented coffee, the Sounders invented American soccer.

Sporting Kansas City — Hallmark

A proudly Kansas City company that is all about good vibes, with extensive Wizard of Oz involvement over the years.

That sounds a lot like Sporting KC to us—a team that needed a rough start in order to find its way. Much the same, Hallmark probably would have never become what it is today without extensive setbacks in its early years.

Toronto FC — Tim Hortons

Timbits and trophies: That’s what Toronto does. Nowadays, anyway.

We only had three Canadian teams to give the Tim Hortons love to, so we figured the toast of MLS deserves the world’s most lovely quick-service cafe and bake shop.

Vancouver Whitecaps — Lululemon

Set on the water, with an amazing mountain view, you couldn’t say a bad word about how great Vancouver looks. It’s straight-up cool. And local company Lululemon makes activewear that looks similarly awesome. We are officially here for MLS yoga wear.

————

This post was a collaboration between Where Is Football and Tap In Guide. Check out their stuff—it’s awesome.

A special thanks to Tap In’s graphic designer Mike Arney for helping bring our ideas to life, and to our buddy Ryan Rosenblatt for developing those ideas with us.

As always, you can follow us on Instagram @whereisfootball.

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citypillow2-blog · 5 years

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What Makes a Great American Food City?

What makes a great modern food city in America? Over the nearly five years I roamed the country as Eater’s national critic, this question almost involuntarily rumbled through my brain. Some standout criteria are obvious: A city’s dining culture needs baselines of excellence and eclecticism in every tier of restaurant. It needs first-rate grocers, farmers markets, and single-focus shops (coffee, ice cream, wine, bread, and pastries). Restaurant-goers should support culinary traditions but, at the same time, encourage creative momentum. And the “sense of place” about which food writers love to crow must include an innate respect for a city’s collective communities, both rooted and new.

But at some point during my wanderings, I realized greatness might boil down to the Long Weekend Theory. The core hypothesis is this: In most every American city with a sizable population and sufficient degree of cultural density, you can eat (and drink) with consistent pleasure throughout three leisure-filled days.

Almost anywhere, for example, you could kick off Friday at the irreverent cocktail bar; fill the major meal slots with the buzziest restaurant in town, the big-ticket splurge, and the indie marvels serving regional dishes from, say, Mexico, or Thailand, or Syria; go crazy at the do-what-we-want sandwich shop serving delicious monstrosities; moon over the soulful pie counter or the ice cream parlor concocting mind-jangling flavor combinations; and wrap it all up with one final blowout at the coolest breakfast hangout in town.

So the real test of a superior food city is, what would happen if you kept eating past the dreamy Monday-morning breakfast?

In a merely standard city for dining, a steep drop in quality and enticement becomes evident. Other hyped restaurants wobble in execution; places serving similar cuisines seem to duplicate one another’s menus. A great food city surpasses the long-weekend itinerary. It is replete with restaurants that deliver their own unique versions of the special something that can make dining out one of life’s sincerest joys.

Of course it’s unrealistic to expect that every meal at every restaurant will be near-mystical in any place. But an exceptional dining town has enough restaurants delivering abundant individuality and constant attention to detail that the choices don’t feel limited to a dozen or fewer true standouts.

Our most immense and our most richly aesthetic metropolises (New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans) can pass this test easily, as do the expected smaller urban centers whose food scenes draw plenty of notice, like Austin, Charleston, and Portland, Maine.

But what about a place like Phoenix? It’s the fifth-largest city in the United States by population, and, including adjacent cities such as Scottsdale and Chandler, the country’s 11th-largest metropolitan area. Despite its magnitude, Phoenix’s restaurant scene largely goes overlooked in the national media. There’s a vague perception of the city as an indistinguishable, sprawling flatland full of middle-of-the-road dining options, many of them chains. Local publications are acutely aware of its reputation as a culinary dead zone.

Scattered national acclaim does materialize. Veteran local chefs like Kevin Binkley (chef-owner of the tasting menu restaurant Binkley’s) and Silvana Salcido Esparza (lauded for her Barrio Café and sublime chiles en nogada) receive steady nods as James Beard semifinalists. Chris Bianco, whose game-changing Pizzeria Bianco has made him the country’s most famous pizzaiolo, is Phoenix’s most recognizable food ambassador. On a countrywide level, that’s about it.

I’ll admit to largely ignoring Phoenix on my Eater beat. I went once during those five years, and even then sped through only a polite survey of the town — I was really there to research a story about Bianco and how his dominion had grown since I’d first tasted his pizza in the 1990s. This past September, the Association of Food Journalists held their annual conference in Phoenix. I didn’t go, but the few attendees I informally polled about their dining experiences didn’t seem overly impressed.

Still, I wondered if treasures had gone unnoticed. Latino residents comprise 41 percent of the population: Surely they were paragons serving specialties from the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora? Ranching and agriculture is a $23.3 billion business in Arizona, and the intense heat equates to unique growing cycles: Asparagus was in high season during the February when I blitzed through Bianco’s restaurants. What other chefs were plugged into the rhythms of the Arizona seasons, and how were they expressing them? Dominic Armato, dining critic for the Arizona Republic, ate hard to compile a recent list of his 100 favorite metro-area restaurants. His roster of curries, tacos, tasting menus, biscuit sandwiches, and dishes that defy easy labeling makes a compelling case for the scope of local dining.

So in October I returned to Phoenix to see if the Valley (as its metro area calls itself) could pass — or surpass, really — the long-weekend test. I came for seven days to understand dining in Phoenix as best and as quickly as I could. A week, obviously, could never be enough to truly absorb the depths of a city’s food culture, though I trusted it was enough to judge if we’ve all been missing something. Or not.

Dinner at Tratto, a handsome restaurant of calming white walls and oak in the Town & Country shopping center, began with chicken livers spread over some righteously charred toast. Sweet-sour plum jam offset the livers; the fruit was left in big, melting hunks and scented with lemon verbena. Wide-mouthed rigatoni came next, sauced in a guinea hen ragu whose lightness felt ideal for a warm Arizona fall evening.

Conveniently located right next door to my favorite branch of Pizzeria Bianco, Tratto is the restaurant I’d most fervidly recommend to anyone visiting Phoenix right now. The finessed cooking, focus on stellar ingredients, and spirit of generosity put it on par with the finest modern Italian restaurants in the country.

A colleague and I ended up sharing the pork chops with apples, and a side dish of garlicky oyster mushrooms, with the group of four seated next to us; it was our sixth meal of the day. We were pointed toward a bottle of Klinec Medana Jakot, a funky Slovenian varietal that was as orange in color as it was in its citrus-blossomy notes. The wine saw us through to the finale, a wedge of custardy lemon tart exactly right in its simplicity.

Tratto opened in 2016 to rhapsodic reviews by local critics. Why don’t more people know about it coast to coast? As a maker of best-new-restaurant lists, I’ll speak to my own (flawed) thinking: Chris Bianco owns Tratto, and I didn’t think he needed any more attention. Yet Bianco has moved into a career phase where he is as much or more of a restaurateur and mentor as he is a chef. At Tratto, he cedes some of the spotlight to the energized team of chef Cassie Shortino, pastry chef Olivia Girard, and beverage director Blaise Faber for the day-to-day operations.

Bianco steps into more of an advisory role at Roland’s Cafe Market Bar, an all-day restaurant launched last year as his collaboration with Armando Hernandez (who previously worked for Bianco), Seth Sulka, and Nadia Holguin. In my long-weekend matrix for Phoenix, Tratto is the Friday-night stage-setter, and Roland’s is the Monday-morning finale. Hernandez and Holguin, who are husband and wife, also run three-year-old Tacos Chiwas on McDowell Road, a bastion of old-line Mexican restaurants northeast of downtown. “Chiwas” riffs off of Holguin and Hernandez’s heritage; both have roots in the northern border state of Chihuahua. The tacos and burritos at Chiwas are solid, but the gorditas — yawning wheat-flour pockets most memorably filled with deshebrada roja (shredded beef in red chile sauce) — steal focus from every other dish.

At Roland’s, the Mexican-with-hints-of-Italian cooking is uplifting and individualistic. An open-faced (read: pizza-shaped) quesadilla dotted with mortadella and asadero cheese is a palpable tribute to Bianco, whose company provides the organic Sonoran wheat flour for the tortilla on which the quesadillas are built. Yet this is really Holguin’s show — an expression of la cocina norteña (the cooking of northern Mexico, born of its desert and Gulf of California geography) that merges her background and her culinary training.

Beyond the fantastic quesadillas (they rightly star on the breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus), the entomatadas highlight Holguin’s precision with textures: crisped and stacked corn tortillas bathe in chile-spiked tomato sauce, fused by shredded asadero melting in the heat, and crowned with a fried egg. Alongside the flaky, painstakingly plaited empanadas filled with cabeza (beef head meat), ask for an array of salsas, bright in color and flavor, that aren’t automatically brought to the table. Chihuahua is the spiritual home of the burrito; Holguin fills her concise, captivating version with pork saturated in ruddy, garlicky chile colorado.

Breakfast or lunch at Roland’s makes for an apt conclusion to a long-weekend agenda, especially in how it frames la cocina norteña: This is a chef ascending to her deserved platform. If in a decade Phoenix becomes nationally synonymous with chefs ingeniously upholding and interpreting variations on northern Mexican cuisines, I predict Roland’s will be seen as a major touchstone in that progression.

Before a meal at Roland’s, seek out some Sonoran- and Chihuahuan-style cooking throughout the Phoenix metro area: It puts a nationally under-sung aspect of the city’s culture in delicious perspective. A rambling Saturday outing began for me with those lush wheat-flour gorditas at Tacos Chiwas. At the original Carolina’s Mexican Food, not far from downtown, sunshine slipped through narrow windows, revealing a nearly imperceptible blizzard in the streaks of light. The air was filled with flour; Carolina’s doubles as a tortilla factory. I ordered a simple, blazingly hot burrito wrapped around scrambled eggs and machaca — a Sonoran staple of dried and rehydrated beef, served shredded and often combined with other ingredients.

I’d return to Carolina’s for the atmosphere, but El Horseshoe Restaurant, on an industrial stretch west of downtown, is the place to truly savor homemade machaca for breakfast. Here, the Avitia family sautees it among potato, egg, and onion, its concentrated beefiness permeating every molecule of the dish, with sides of rice, beans, and a freshly made tortilla. The state of Sonora, beyond its desert interior, stretches across much of the Gulf of California’s eastern coastline; Horseshoe serves a restoring version of cahuamanta, a classic brothy stew bobbing with shrimp and pearly hunks of manta ray.

For a deeper immersion into regional seafood dishes, I swung by El Rey de Los Ostiones, a seafood market in a low-slung strip mall northwest of downtown. The bilingual staff graciously quizzed me on my tastes, finally delivering customized aguachiles and ceviches full of shrimp and oysters, along with several kinds of hot sauce and other condiments to tweak the seasonings. A 10-minute drive from El Rey, I had my favorite tacos of the trip at Ta’Carbon, an always-packed draw specializing in carne asada (among other meats like lengua and cabeza) grilled over mesquite.

Before the afternoon ended I veered off the Sonoran trail for a “taco” of another kind: a puffy, palm-scorching, mood-elevating flatbread filled with green chile-laced beef, refried beans, and cheese at the Fry Bread House, a Phoenix institution started in 1992 by Cecelia Miller of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

Restaurants serving American Indian cuisines are too few around the country and in the Southwest. Kai, the flagship restaurant at the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass and one of the Valley’s toniest dining experiences, vaguely themes its dishes in Native American directions with indigenous seeds and beans and plants. But really, Kai falls more into the category of modern-American splurge restaurant.

The signature grilled buffalo tenderloin came surrounded by sides and adornments straight from 1990 — smoked corn puree, cholla cactus buds, a light chile of scarlet runner beans, chorizo, a drizzle of syrup made from saguaro blossoms — that manage to coalesce. That entree is $58. The setting, with the sun disappearing behind mountains in the distance, is gorgeous, but for a more consistently dazzling and sure-file splurge, I’d suggest Binkley’s immersive tasting menu, or Silvana Salcido Esparza’s Barrio Café Gran Reserva for beauties like pan-seared corvina served with rose pepper mole sauce and salsa fragrant with smoky morita chiles (and her chiles en nogada, as superb as ever).

On Sunday, I needed extra coffee to jolt me after Saturday’s taxing schedule. A skillful macchiato and pour over at Giant Coffee animated me. First stop: Little Miss BBQ. Every major city in America has a pit master whose next-level dedication has pushed its scene to great smoked-meat raptures in recent years. Scott Holmes achieved this in Phoenix with his blackened, barky brisket, deliriously fatty in the style of Austin’s famed Franklin Barbecue. Loved the on-theme smoked pecan pie for dessert.

Second lunch, a restaurant recommended by local food-writer friends, was the trip’s sweetest surprise. I’d been briefed on the setup at Alzohour Market. Owner Zhor Saad takes orders and prepares the tiny restaurant’s Moroccan specialties herself. I poked around, looking at the clothing and candies and bric-a-brac she sells in the retail space adjacent to her dining room while I waited for bastilla, the sweet-savory masterpiece traditionally made of spiced pigeon and roasted almonds wrapped in phyllo and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Saad substituted shredded chicken in her bastilla, but it was among the best versions I’ve had in America. Her lamb tagine was nearly as poetic.

Charleen Badman, chef and owner of FnB, also regularly appears on Beard semifinalist lists; her restaurant in Old Town Scottsdale gave me the trip’s most accurate and evocative sense of Arizona’s growing cycles. Salads of persimmon and pistachio, or little gem with pears, plums, and pecans; rice-stuffed squash blossoms with a riff on shakshuka made with summer squash; sheets of pastas entwined with foraged lobster mushrooms: I felt myself settle into the land in Badman’s dining room. Like many modern chefs, she thinks about flavors globally. For example, wonderful lamb manti (Turkish dumplings) dolloped with yogurt, sprinkled with pine nuts, and served in butter flecked with urfa chile was one of several dishes that evoked Middle Eastern cuisines. That dish also paired well with a fairly spectacular syrah from Rune Wines, a luminary among Arizona’s maturing viniculture industry.

I sat finishing the last bites of huckleberry-lemon sponge cake with fig-leaf ice cream, thinking that in a city with a glossier dining reputation, Badman and FnB would be basking in even more accolades. If I’d have beelined to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport right after this dinner, I would have climbed into the heavens happy and sated.

A quartet of Addison’s favorite tacos in Phoenix, at Ta’Carbon

Assuming that most people don’t gorge through a city like a food critic on a research jag, I’ve detailed more than enough meals to exceed a long eating weekend in Phoenix. (And here I’ll fill in a couple of potentially empty slots in the Long Weekend Theory itinerary I vaguely followed above: You can drink as well as you eat at Tratto, but for a pre-Friday night dinner starting point, the move is Bitter & Twisted Cocktail Parlour, cheekily located in a building where the Arizona Prohibition Headquarters was once housed. Also, for a second breakfast option, try local darling Matt’s Big Breakfast for Americana personified.)

Sure, there were ups and downs as I continued grazing through the area. Other charmers included Pa’La, where Claudio Urciuoli writes out his affordable daily menu on a chalkboard behind the counter, anchored by a top-shelf mix-and-match grain bowl. But there were mid-level letdowns, too. Two memorable disappointments came from newer arrivals with strong local word of mouth. Maybe I totally misordered at Cotton & Copper in Tempe, but the oddly mealy corn dumplings in parmesan cream and carpaccio topped with citrus segments and chunks of chewy cheese felled my dinner at the bar. And I was intrigued by the promise of “modern Southwest cuisine” at Ghost Ranch in Chandler; that amorphous genre could use some sharp redefining. I didn’t find it in a ho-hum sampler platter (pork and chicken enchiladas, cheese-filled chiles rellenos, grilled skirt steak) and bland grilled chicken with polenta and green chile jus.

Overall, though, I left impressed by Phoenix. I knew there were pleasures and pockets of potential gems I’d left untried: dim sum at Mekong Palace Restaurant in Mesa, other serious pizzerias spurred by Bianco’s success, and upscale stalwart Rancho Pinot, for starters. But even after only a week of immersive gorging, it’s clear that dismissing the Valley as a snowbird’s destination for chains and lowest-common-denominator palates is anachronistic and plain wrong. I’d nudge other national food writers to come test out the Long Weekend Theory here for themselves. Is Phoenix’s restaurant culture on par with a similar sprawl of urban vastness like Houston? Not yet. Is the breadth and depth of dining better than most of us are giving it credit for? It won’t take more than a few happy, immersive days of eating to know the answer is: absolutely.

Bill Addison is a food critic for the Los Angeles Times; he was Eater’s roving national critic for nearly five years until November 2018. Fact checked by Pearly Huang Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/1/23/18183298/best-restaurants-phoenix-scottsdale-tempe

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appletable80-blog · 5 years

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Checking in on the LA Food Scene

This post originally appeared on April 27, 2019, in Amanda Kludt’s newsletter “From the Editor,” a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world each week. Read the archives and subscribe now.

Last week I went out to LA and managed to fit in some good eating. Some notes from the road:

I would like to pretend I’m more sophisticated than this, but chef Mei Lin’s tom yum onion (a play on the Bloomin’ Onion) has haunted me ever since I saw it on Instagram. I had to try it. I did try it. And it was so much better than the original that inspired it.

That said, my biggest takeaway from Lin’s restaurant, Nightshade, is that Max Boonthanakit, just named an Eater Young Gun, is putting out the most innovative and delicious desserts I’ve had in a while. If you find yourself nearby, I highly recommend stopping by for his guava, cream cheese, and white chocolate trompe l’oeil (innovative!) and coconut mousse with lime coconut granita (most delicious).

I would eat this Sonoratown chimichanga every day of my life if I could.

The Row development is pretty nuts. It’s a giant collection of warehouses close to Skid Row (one of the largest encampments of homeless individuals in the U.S.) and the Arts District downtown that developers are trying to turn into a destination with restaurants, retail, gyms, spas, and office space. I visited the 45,000-square-foot (!) Tartine/Chris Bianco compound called the Manufactory, which includes a roastery, commissary, market, casual cafe, and dinner-only Italian restaurant. On the Tuesday night we went, the whole place felt like an eerie ghost town. That’s allegedly the vibe on most days and nights, with the exception of Sundays, when hundreds of people flood the complex to visit Smorgasburg there.

The Chris Bianco-Tartine partnership unfortunately doesn’t feature his famous pizza — it has some flatbreads in the cafe — but the food at its Alameda Supper Club is pretty solid. Get the bread and butter and his crab spaghetti if you go.

Spoon By H is everything that everyone hyped it up to be.

I got to be one of the first paying customers at the Firehouse Hotel, a stylish, new nine-room spot in the Arts District. I didn’t get the chance to try the food, but I would be down to throw an event by the backyard fire pit.

Get to Fiona and get a fruit pie.

Porridge and Puffs has this miso caramel mochi thing that just blew my mind. The porridge is also wonderful.

Porridge from Porridge + Puffs

Amanda Kludt

Not a food thing, but one stray thought: does LA make you into a worse Lyft rider? Anywhere else I would never take a meeting, listen to a podcast, or eat a scone in a ride share, and I did all of those things — constantly and sometimes all at once — in LA because I had to spend so much time in a car on this trip. Who knew LA could turn a New Yorker into an even worse person?

Opening of the Week: Dear John’s

Wonho Frank Lee

This is one of my favorite restaurant stories of the year, and I keep seeing it pop up at the top of Eater LA’s traffic reports, so I feel like Angelenos must be into it too.

Basically, two major LA players — Josiah Citrin and Hans Rockenwagner — are reviving a classic Culver City martini bar and steakhouse called Dear John’s. The twist here is a developer is going to knock down the building in April 2021, so there’s a built-in expiration date. I love that they are giving the old gal the swan song she deserves. And also, I figure it must be compelling to enter a project knowing you don’t have to sustain a long-term business.

On Eater

Intel: Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar is suing an operation in Chicago that seems to be ripping off both Tosi and Black Tap in one fell swoop; McDonald’s will roll out some of its international items to U.S. locations this summer; Seattle empire builder Renee Erickson opened her newest spot, Bistro Shirlee; a bar that looks like it was designed by Lisa Frank opened in Philly; following the backlash against credit card-only businesses, Sweetgreen accepts cash again; Brooklyn’s Five Leaves opened an outpost in Los Angeles, and it looks better than the original; Olmsted’s Greg Baxtrom opened a casual follow-up restaurant called Maison Yaki in Brooklyn; high-end Italian restaurant chain, and subject of many lawsuits, Scarpetta is expanding to London; Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s 7,300-square-foot seafood restaurant the Fulton AND his JFK restaurant in the old TWA terminal building both open in New York next month; Houston don Bobby Heugel and star chef Justin Yu opened their pretty new venture, Squable, this week; all three restaurants going into a new Chicago food hall are black-owned; the Standard hotel group announced the dining and drinking operations for their first London outpost; the Michelin Guide reached out to over 100 California restaurants on Instagram to get photo rights ahead of their big California guide announcement in June; Gotham Bar & Grill’s Alfred Portale will open his first restaurant in 34 years; lauded New Orleans sandwich shop Turkey and the Wolf has a new restaurant in the works; the people behind one of London’s best restaurants will open a follow-up ”inspired by the buvettes of Paris and the pintxos bars in San Sebastián”; Momofuku’s new CEO is 29 and from the Zabar family; and Stephen Starr will open a restaurant in a new photography museum in Manhattan this fall.

Why you’re seeing blowfish tails everywhere.

NYC’s 12 top restaurants serving the underrated food of Puebla.

A look inside Houston’s very pretty restaurant Vibrant. Have we hit peak terrazo or is this just the start?

We might not have to worry about the Game of Thrones dragons and their loss of appetite.

Review: Brooklyn’s coolest new bar that also happens to have a good chicken sandwich, the Fly.

Please welcome a whole new slew of writers and editors to Eater: Madeleine Davies, Jaya Saxena, Jenny G. Zhang, and Osayi Endolyn.

What does it say when people stan their local grocery stores?

Watch: Lucas Peterson explores the significance and history of rice in a new Eater mini-series, Rooted. Episode 1: Farming, cultivating, selling rice at Koda Farms in California. Episode 2: How Anson Mills saved ancient grains of rice from extinction. Episode 3: Gullah legend Mrs. Emily Meggertt explains the importance of her traditional rice dishes.

Finally, let’s all remember that the World’s Best Female Chef Award (brought to you by people behind the eurocentric and male-dominated World’s 50 Best List) is absurdly sexist.

Off Eater

From the Editor

Editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt’s favorite food news and stories from Eater and beyond each week

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/4/29/18522817/from-the-editor-notes-from-la

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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heliumrelish1-blog · 5 years

Text

Checking in on the LA Food Scene

Last week I went out to LA and managed to fit in some good eating. Some notes from the road:

I would eat this Sonoratown chimichanga every day of my life if I could.

Spoon By H is everything that everyone hyped it up to be.

Get to Fiona and get a fruit pie.

Porridge and Puffs has this miso caramel mochi thing that just blew my mind. The porridge is also wonderful.

Porridge from Porridge + Puffs

Amanda Kludt

Opening of the Week: Dear John’s

Wonho Frank Lee

This is one of my favorite restaurant stories of the year, and I keep seeing it pop up at the top of Eater LA’s traffic reports, so I feel like Angelenos must be into it too.

On Eater

Why you’re seeing blowfish tails everywhere.

NYC’s 12 top restaurants serving the underrated food of Puebla.

A look inside Houston’s very pretty restaurant Vibrant. Have we hit peak terrazo or is this just the start?

We might not have to worry about the Game of Thrones dragons and their loss of appetite.

Review: Brooklyn’s coolest new bar that also happens to have a good chicken sandwich, the Fly.

Please welcome a whole new slew of writers and editors to Eater: Madeleine Davies, Jaya Saxena, Jenny G. Zhang, and Osayi Endolyn.

What does it say when people stan their local grocery stores?

Finally, let’s all remember that the World’s Best Female Chef Award (brought to you by people behind the eurocentric and male-dominated World’s 50 Best List) is absurdly sexist.

Off Eater

From the Editor

Editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt’s favorite food news and stories from Eater and beyond each week

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/4/29/18522817/from-the-editor-notes-from-la

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

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travelouts · 6 years

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Top 5 Worlds’ Best Foodie Cities In U.S.A

Do you love Foods? What a Stupid Question, I mean who does love. Everybody loves food; it’s like Oxygen for life. Some are fonds of foods who love to travel just to have different taste of foods around the world. Pleasing food critics and locals alike, standout foodie cities in America are constantly changing their menus and adding new eateries in their foods menu list, making them worth for every traveler. Let’s explore the world’s best Foodie Cities in the USA of 2018 with also exciting cheap deals of flights tickets.

Here Is The Amazing List For Best Foodie Cities Of USA.

Chicago

New York City

Charleston

San Francisco

Los Angeles

Chicago: #1 In Best Foodie Cities In The USA.

The city is adobe to many world-renowned restaurants and hotels. It is one of the best food cities. You can find everything from Asian to French, from Irish to Italian. And when in a city don’t forget to immerse yourself in the hometown delicacies like special pizzas and city’s special hot dogs. Moreover, Taste of Chicago has definitely come a long way since its humble beginnings as a somewhat small food festival in 1980. The menu includes over 300 varieties of food items from more than 70 food vendors and restaurants. So, if you are booking your cheap tickets to Chicago , look forward to a delightful travel experience of a world of local Chicago as well as multi-ethnic culinary wonders. Right from giant Turkey legs to goat biryani and banana dumplings filled with minced pork and dozens of other cuisines in between are served here.

New York City: #2 In Best Foodie Cities In The USA.

New York has the best street foods across in the USA. There is some food which only founded on New York Street. Some famous foods of New York, “Bacon, Egg & Cheese”, Porterhouse Steak, Braised Pork Shoulder, Di Fare Pizza, Lamb over Rice, Lasagna Alla Bolognese. Chinese food at Szechuan gourmet, lap up bagels and lox at Russ & Daughters, flavour the freshest sushi at Sushi Yasaka, dive right into a bowl of ramen at Ippudo, or simply enjoy a New York slice at Emily, a remarkable little pizza joint in Brooklyn. Make an advance booking of cheap flights to New York to avoid high price.

Charleston: #3 In Best Foodie Cities In The USA

Charleston, domestic to ace Chef Sean Brock of the beloved Husk and cookbook maven Nathalie Dupree, has been a subscriber seemingly all the time. Known as rib-sticking comfort food, the authentic Southern staples and fresh seafood offerings have earned this quaint city recognition from a variety of industry experts as a foodie haven. Also, City Bar partners featuring an array of eclectic dishes and concoctions that provide insight into Charleston’s cuisine and cocktail scene.

San Francisco: #4 In Best Foodie Cities In The USA

One of the finest ways to learn about any place is by tasting the local food. Food Walking Tours of San Francisco reveals the city’s most fascinating neighbourhoods by discovering their cookery delights. San Franciscans make the best hearty seafood-rich soup with local ingredients using Italian cooking styles. Their pleasant food tastings are sampled at famed and off-the-radar food establishments. Throughout the way, you get to test all from Venezuelan wraps to cinnamon horchata cupcakes. You also get to try out some Italian prosciutto, other sweet & salty dishes and some Vietnamese coffee.

Los Angeles: #5 In Best Foodie Cities In The USA

Food lovers who are planning Los Angeles tours can enjoy different eat out places which are according to the budget and taste as well. You will get a huge choice of restaurants to choose from where you can taste local food of this city and international cuisines. During your night out enjoy hamburgers from Original Tommy this is a popular chain of hamburger restaurants here you can also enjoy late-night chill burgers, cheeseburger after your Saturday Night Live. You can choose restaurants according to the located such you can choose from the long list of Marina Del Rey Restaurants.

#flights to los angeles #flights to lax #tickets to chicago #Cheap Flights to San Francisco #cheap flights to new york #travel #travel destinations #Travel holidays #trip #trek

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pizzapies001 · 5 years

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Los Angeles' most loved Chicago pie pizza restaurant!

WHAT IS CHICAGO PIE PIZZA?

Chicago-Pie pizza is a pizza baked according to various methods developed in Chicago. The most popular is the deep-dish pizza.

The pan in which it is cooked gives the pizza a high edge which provides enough space for high amounts of cheese and a thicks tomato sauce.

So If you are a Chicago pie pizza lover residing near Los Angeles, look no further!

’Hollywood Pies’ pizzeria is a hangout place for Chicago-pie pizza fans which started as a very simple commercial kitchen in 2011.

It is situated within the heart of Los Angeles, California.

#Famous Chicago Pizza Restaurants in Los angeles #Chicago Deep dish pizza near me #Order Chicago style pizza in Los Angeles #Chicago Deep dish pizza delivery #Pizza delivery 90035

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thelooptasteofchicago2 · 4 years

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Chicago Guide - Top Five Fun Facts

Third largest city in the United States The name 'Windy City' may be known throughout the world but the fact that Chicago is the third largest city in the United States may not. Trailing only a few short steps behind New York City and Los Angeles, Chicago enjoys a rising number of tourists from all around the world, with 55 million visitors last year, a consistently-growing number compared to the years before.

Millennium Park, thelooptasteofchicago without a smidgen of doubt, managed to hang onto its top spot as the most visited attraction in downtown Chicago. In fact, its record is unbeaten throughout the Midwest. The city also has a large number of other similar attraction that emits the same gravitational pull - The Art Institute of Chicago, Cloud Gate, Willis Tower, Navy Pier, Shedd Aquarium, Chicago History Museum and Lincoln Park Zoo, the Grant Park Music Festival, Chicago Opera Theater events and Harris Theater for Music and Dance, just to name a few.

The list of popular tourist attractions may continue to be the biggest draws to thelooptasteofchicago , but so are the countless types of unique cuisine and shopping destinations. Don't miss the chance to hunt down exclusionary and delicious Chicago-style hot dogs, deep dish pizza or the Maxwell Street Polish Sausage while taking the charter bus around intriguing architectural structures like Sears Towers and museums that feature 1920s gangster history like Al Capone, Frank 'The Enforcer Nitti' (Al Capone's successor), John 'Papa Johnny Torrio, John Dillinger, Lester Joseph 'Baby Face' Nelson, etc. And when you're ready for some serious shopping, organize a few side trips to Magnificent Mile or State Street. The streets are lined with famous branded retail outlets, family-run shops, fanciful diners, fast food restaurants, playful cafes, bakeries, breezy ice-cream shops and coffee outlets.

#thelooptasteofchicago #http://www.thelooptasteofchicago.com

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bestwesternanchorage · 4 years

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Anchorage to satiate your Wanderlust

Anchorage may not be a household name in the top travel destinations conversations, as opposed to Paris or Florence. However, there may be a silver lining in being the recluse travel destination nestled amidst Alaskan Wilderness. It offers unique opportunities to engage in Kayaking or Skiing as well as quaint walks or camping trips. Mountain biking on off-road trails, whale watching, or sumptuous meals in Downtown Anchorage, the city does fall short in offering an array of exquisite travel experiences. Anchorage defies images of tundra or polar ice caps. It is rather pleasant during the summers, thereby attracting tourists. Winters are all about snow, and the city offers singular opportunities for skiing and dogsledding. The Chugach Mountains encircle the coastal town. You escape your mundane work-life to alpine attractions, exquisite seafood, dense wilderness, bustling markets, museums with stellar hotel deals in Anchorage. Some famous tourist attractions in Anchorage include – • Alaskan Railroad • Portage Glacier • Byron Glacier trail • Prince William Sound Glacier Cruises • Anchorage Museum of History and Art • Alyeska Aerial Tram • Anchorage Walking Tour • Skiing or Snowboarding • Wildlife Viewing Tour • Anchorage Zoo • Mountain Biking Tours on Tony Knowles Coastal Trail or Chester Creek Trail Anchorage's municipality drives community support towards tourism and seeks to put Anchorage on every wanderlust list a traveler is making. Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage is well connected by air to major American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Honolulu, or Seattle. Once you land in Anchorage, shuttle companies and car rentals take care of your travel plans. The Alaska highway provides road passage to Anchorage from Canada as it connects northern British Columbia to Fairbanks. Popular neighborhoods in Anchorage are Downtown, Midtown, Spenard, Girdwood, etc. These are the place be when you are looking for a hotel in Anchorage. Tourism caters to one among nine jobs in Anchorage. Travelers bring in a whopping $38 million a year in taxes. Like the breathtaking views of Glaciers and adrenaline pumped kayaking adventures, hotel deals in Anchorage do not disappoint either. You have options ranging from luxury and boutique hotels to affordable hotels, all in the Downtown area. If you are looking to stray away from the bustling livelihood, accommodations are also available as dorm beds in hostels or homestays with a B&B experience. A swarming crafts market and eateries awaken the Anchorage town. Your cravings could be adequately satisfied by hot dogs, grills, steaks, pizzas, wine, and all your favorites. But if you seek Alaskan delicacies, you should splurge on the seafood options available anywhere from upscale restaurants or budget eateries. Downtown Anchorage caters to the shopping bug in you. The market here brings together craftsmen, artisans, farmers from the region and offer you unique souvenirs that represent the cultural identity of Anchorage and Alaska as a whole. However, if local markets are not your forte, Anchorage also offers conventional malls and shopping centers to suit your needs. Imagine a welcoming and walkable city, yet so vibrant and full of life, could be your next travel destination that rejuvenates your life. The Best Western Golden Lion Hotel gives you the best the city has to offer and keeps you close to the action. Behold the wonders of Anchorage scenery from comfortable rooms with a myriad of services, including fitness center, business center, onsite salon, etc. To unveil the most exquisite experience Anchorage has to offer, book yourself a great hotel in Anchorage.

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blogtriptravelguide-blog · 4 years

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7 best cities to visit in the USA

From thousands of cities to choose from, especially if you are traveling to the USA for the first time, it can be quite hard to choose. You can never be done with exploring America even if you have visited hundreds of times. Every city has something great to offer, but there are some which stand out from them all. We have chosen the 7 best cities to visit in the USA by most famous attractions, entertainment, culinary offerings, diversity, art, and architecture.

1. San Francisco

The city of San Francisco has a population of more than 800,000 people and it is a top destination for many US nationals as well as tourists. -If you think of San Francisco, the first thing that comes to mind is probably The Golden Gates Bridge. Shown in hundreds of movies, printed on every postcard, and declared as the modern world wonders, this bridge is a stunning steel giant. No one leaves San Fran without taking a photo with the bridge in the background; -If you are visiting San Francisco make sure to stop by the Waterfront at Fisherman’s Wharf, this place offers the best seafood in the city and many fun tours; -Ride around the city with the San Fran Cable Car which is the last manually operated system today; -Sports lovers will enjoy watching a game at the world-famous AT&T Park stadium which is the home of San Francisco Giants - one of the most popular and famous teams in the league.

2. Chicago

The hub of finance, culture, education, and technology has thousands of fun activities to offer: -Visit the Garfield Park Conservatory where you will see more than 100,000 plants; -If you are on a time crunch get on a Chicago’s First lady architecture tour which will tell you a history of 50 buildings while riding on a boat; -Want to see Chicago from above and you are not afraid of the heights, get on the Willis Tower Skydeck and get a view from 103rd floor; -Visit the Lincoln Park Zoo and see thousands of mammals, birds, and reptiles; -Check out mummies and other biological and anthropological collections at the Field Museum; -Grab a slice of pizza at the famous Vito and Nick’s pizzeria who have been open for business since 1932; -Sip a cold beer at the Half Acre Brewery Balmoral.

3. New York

The city that never sleeps gives you a different experience every day: -Visit the Statue of Liberty which will be only a ferry ride away from Staten Island, you might also want to catch a tour; -See the city from above from the Empire State Building; -Visit one of the 80 museums and learn the history, art, and culture of New York and USA; -If you love sports then you will definitely enjoy a game at the Yankees Stadium in Bronx; -Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and take stunning photos of NY; -Have a picnic and throw some ball at the Central Park; -Watch the live broadcast of Today show from the Rockefeller Plaza; -Take photos at the Times Square; -Watch the sunset from the West Street highway.

4. Los Angeles

The city of Angels is home to entertainment, dreams, and the movie industry: -See the Hollywood sign by hiking up the Griffith Park; -See paintings by Van Gogh and Rembrandt at the Getty Museum; -Relax and read a book at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens; -See LA from the highest peak in the city – The Griffith Observatory which was completed in 1935; -Visit LACMA which is the largest museum in the western United States; -Roller-skate on the Venice break boardwalk and catch a beautiful sunset; -Take a Warner Bros Studio Tour and see how your favorite American TV shows and movies are made; -Enjoy the weekend and maximum fun at the Disneyland resort; -Experience the creativity of local street artist at the Hollywood Walk of Fame; -Live in luxury and spend some big bucks at the Rodeo drive where you will find hundreds of high-end designer stores.

5. San Diego

The easy-going city of San Diego has endless monuments, museums and theaters for all the USA culture lovers: -Enjoy the Spanish architecture and over 2000 plants at the Balboa Park and Botanical house; -Take a stroll on the Embarcadero and watch the sunset from the harbor; -Go on a hike on the Rocky Point Loma which was the first landing point of the European expedition; -Surf at the La Jolla beach; -Visit the historical San Diego Old Town which is built and designed to look like you have gone back in time to1820´s; -Visit pandas and other 650 species at The San Diego Zoo; -Cruise through the San Diego Harbor, on this 1-hour long tour you will be able to see more than 50 landmarks of the city; -If you are lucky enough you can catch a glimpse of whales that pass through San Diego shores between the months of December and April.

6. Miami

The perfect weather and stunning beaches will make you want to stay in Miami forever! -Get some tan at the Miami Beach; -Visit the Jungle Island where you will able to hold a lemur, take a photo with a slot and pet one of the capybaras; -Wander through the Art Deco district which is located just in front of the Ocean drive; -For a real touristic experience visit the Bayside Marketplace, it has over 150 tourist shops, cafes, restaurants, and bars; -View over 2000 animals at the Miami Zoo and enjoy the wildlife from up close; -Visit one of the interactive physics, biology and chemistry exhibits of The Miami Science Museum; -Take your kids to the Miami Children’s Museum and entertain your youngsters; -Stroll through the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden which has a collection of rare flowers, trees, and cycads -See a performance at the Olympia Theater located at Flagler Street.

7. Las Vegas

The City of Las Vegas will offer you endless fun and sleepless nights: -See the dancing fountain of Bellagio which performs every 30 minutes; -Gamble at the Caesars Palace on one of the oldest machines in Las Vegas; -Have a classic dinner and fun cocktails at the Peppermill which is open 24hrs a day; -Catch a show at the Park Theater which has hosted such superstars as Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars; -Ride the wave simulator at the FlowRider, Planet Hollywood; -Visit The Venetian resort and eat gelato while riding a gondola; -Look into the criminal world and visit The Mob Museum where you can find a vintage electric chair and try out the firearm simulator; -Eat at one of the many Michelin Star restaurants; stop by Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s kitchen and watch the chef’s work side by side. Read the full article

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blogtravelingabroad-blog · 4 years

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7 best cities to visit in the USA

1. San Francisco

2. Chicago

3. New York

4. Los Angeles

5. San Diego

6. Miami

7. Las Vegas

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years

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Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Ep. 347 Update)

The all-star food writer Kenji López-Alt decided to open his own restaurant. Then came kitchen snafus, disastrously clogged toilets, and long days away from his young daughter. (Photo: Max Pixel)

Kenji López-Alt became a rock star of the food world by bringing science into the kitchen in a way that everyday cooks can appreciate. Then he dared to start his own restaurant — and discovered problems that even science can’t solve.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

This week, we’re playing an updated Episode No. 347, “Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant.” It features the best-selling food writer Kenji López-Alt, telling us about his adventures as a first-time restaurateur. And then, at the end of the original episode, you’ll hear a recent follow-up interview that’ll give you even more reasons to never, ever open a restaurant. Also, we’re bringing Freakonomics Radio Live to Philadelphia on June 6 and London on Sept. 7. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/live. You’ll also find information on our upcoming shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

* * *

Some people just can’t leave well enough alone. Consider, for instance, the case of the famous food writer, the one who used the scientific method to take apart everything we know about cooking and put it back together.

Kenji LÓPEZ-ALT: If you use vodka in place of some of the water in your pie crust, you end up with a dough that is much flakier and much lighter.

He investigated whether the key ingredient in New York pizza really is the water.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So I did a full double-blind experiment where I got water — starting with perfectly distilled water and up to various levels of dissolved solids inside the water. And what we basically ended up finding was the water makes almost no difference compared to other variables in the dough.

He found that the secret to General Tso’s chicken lay in geometry.

LÓPEZ-ALT: The geometry of food is important because one of the big things is surface-area-to-volume ratio.

And he explored the relationship between meat and salt; he proved why it’s important to salt a hamburger at the last minute, on the surface of the meat:

LOPEZ-ALT: We rented a baseball pitching machine that would throw hamburgers at the wall at 45 miles per hour. You’ll see that salted hamburger kind of bounces off the wall like a rubber ball, whereas the burger that has salt only on the outside kind of splatters.

This was the man who finally brought science into the kitchen in a way that non-scientists could appreciate. It helped that his work was fun, not preachy, and delicious. We interviewed him a while back, for an episode called “Food + Science = Victory!”

LÓPEZ-ALT: I think a lot of people think of science as sort of the opposite of tradition or the opposite of natural. And really it’s not.

He had just published his first cookbook, a massive thing called The Food Lab, which went on to win a James Beard Award. His reputation and reach only grew. But then, something else beckoned. Was it opportunity — or a trap?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s that temptation you can’t resist.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: the food writer who flew too close to the flame.

* * *

Kenji López-Alt grew up in New York, in a family of scientists, and went off to M.I.T. to study biology. He got a little bored, maybe burnt-out, and during the summers started working in restaurant kitchens in Boston. After college, he worked in an architecture firm for a bit.

LÓPEZ-ALT: For a few months, half a year maybe.

And then back to restaurant kitchens.

LÓPEZ-ALT: My very first restaurant job was at a place called Fire and Ice. It’s a Mongolian grill, so I was a knight of the round grill. I stood in the middle of a giant cast iron grill and cooked stir-fried food for people, and flipped asparagus tips into the air and stuff.

Over the next several years, he worked in a series of higher-end restaurants in Boston.

LÓPEZ-ALT: After that, that was the end of my culinary career, or my cooking career.

He began building a career as a food writer, at Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen. Then, on the food site Serious Eats, he started a column called The Food Lab. He wasn’t expecting to turn into a food-writing rock star.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I absolutely wasn’t expecting it. I was a freelance writer living in a one-bedroom apartment with no windows in Brooklyn at the time.

DUBNER: Now, after doing all that and having that platform and enjoying it, what made you think it was a good idea to not only get back into the restaurant business, but open your own restaurant?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s always that temptation you can’t resist. It’s like, “Oh, what if I just went back and do cooking for a little while? Would I be able to do this?” So, I had a daughter. She’s 17 months old now.

DUBNER: Congratulations.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Thank you. And when she was born, my wife and I decided that she would continue to work, and I would be the at-home parent. So I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for the last 17 months. And about six months into that, I was approached by some friends of friends who owned a bar in San Mateo, near where we live. And they were interested in opening up a beer hall and they were looking for a chef partner. And so I thought this might be something fun I could do in my spare time. Which, you don’t have too much spare time with a baby on your hands, but I thought this could be something fun and this is a good opportunity, relatively low-risk. Mainly it was because my wife and I sort of longed for a place like this in San Mateo, a family-friendly, casual, upscale place. And that was the concept that they were working on. So it seemed perfect for me.

And initially I thought my involvement would be relatively minimal. I would work on some menus. I would lend my name to the menu. What was actually really surprising to me was — when I first signed on with them, I sent a short little tweet saying, “Hey, this is happening, I’m opening a restaurant,” something like that. Eater picked it up. A bunch of other publications picked it up. And then all of a sudden it became not, “Kenji López-Alt is partnering with these two guys who are opening a restaurant.” What it became was, “Kenji López-Alt is opening a restaurant.” And then I was like, “Oh man, I guess I’m really going to get sucked into this.”

DUBNER: Okay, so the restaurant is called Wursthall. So, first of all, for those who haven’t been to San Mateo, California, just give us a quick sense of the vibe of the place, and then we’ll get into the restaurant and why the choices were made to have a German beer hall with sausages.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, San Mateo is a city that’s basically dead center between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. My wife works at Google and she works down in Silicon Valley. We initially moved up into the city and her commute was crazy. So we’re like, “All right we’ll move down to San Mateo.” And if you look at the real estate curve: very expensive everywhere, but extremely expensive in San Francisco, extremely expensive in Silicon Valley. And in San Mateo and a couple of the surrounding cities, there’s a small dip, so we were like, “Alright, that’s where we can afford to live.” And that’s where my wife’s commute will be all right. I think there’s actually a lot of people in our situation there right now.

DUBNER: Why a German beer hall — why was that the right concept? Or why was that the concept they wanted?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, it’s two factors. One of them is the space itself. We’re located in a really nice, old, historic building, lots of nice light, so it seemed very conducive to this beer-hall atmosphere. The other thing is that my partner Adam Simpson, he is really into beer. And finally, beer halls are kind of just popular right now. So it seemed like a concept that worked in the space, that worked with Adam’s knowledge-base, and it seemed to be something that was hot and lacking in the San Mateo area.

So far so good, right? So for everyone out there who’s thinking, “Hey, maybe I should open a restaurant” — we asked Kenji López-Alt: “what’s the first step?”

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, the first step to opening a restaurant is, don’t. Opening a restaurant is a series of putting out fires every single day. I mean, even once you’re open, it’s still a series of putting out fires. Step one: don’t.

DUBNER: Okay. So, can you walk us through the opening process? What kind of work goes into those preparatory weeks, months, I assume?

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, the first step is, you have to have a reason for people to believe that you’re going to succeed and to give you money to do it. Because it’s not cheap to open a restaurant. And then from there it’s working with the architects and designers and doing all the build-out, which inevitably takes way more time than you expect. And for us we had this extra problem, because we’re in this really old building and the previous tenants and the landlord, they didn’t take the best care of the space.

But working back from my side, from the kitchen perspective: initially a lot of it was conceptualizing how German do we want to be? How California do we want to be? Because we knew we wanted to do both. Figuring out what the service style was going to be, and how customers are going to order. And really thinking to ourselves, “All right, when people come in here, what are they coming in to do?” Initially, when Adam and my other partner, Tyson Mao — when they were thinking of a beer hall, they thought, “Right, this is going to be essentially a bar. Some people maybe come to have a nice meal, but most will be coming to drink and have some food on the side.” And that’s what the initial menu is designed around: a selection of sausages, a couple of sandwiches, some appetizers to share.

So now he got to work creating a menu.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I had developed the initial opening menu on my own in my home kitchen before we had even hired any sort of kitchen staff. And I’m pretty methodical, so I had a recipe booklet written out, everything done in metric units, something that anybody could look at and replicate. Part of the idea was because it’s going to be relatively low-priced and high-volume, the kitchen has to be able to run itself, even without very minute oversight.

DUBNER: What about the sausage-making itself? That’s a big component. Can you just talk about how involved you were in the design and execution, and maybe experimentation, and figuring out how to not only make the sausages that you wanted, but how they were going to be prepared?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Yeah, from the start, we knew that we weren’t going to be able to make the sausages in-house, because we didn’t have the facilities. So in order to make a large volume of sausage, you need to have a dedicated refrigerated room, where you can grind and mix and stuff and everything, because if sausage mixture gets too warm while you’re forming it, it doesn’t bind properly, and your sausages end up crumbly and dry. It was literally physically impossible for us to make sausages in-house. So very early on we decided, “All right, we’re going to have to find some partners to work with who can execute our ideas at a level of quality and volume that we’re happy with.”

DUBNER: Is it an easy thing to find, someone who can handle that kind of quality and especially volume?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No. I mean the sausage part was mainly me going to every single sausage maker I could find in the Bay Area. We did want to keep it local. We visited many, many butchers and sausage makers, and there are many, many bad sausages around. Sausage-making is a non-trivial skill. You think, “Okay it’s just meat and fat, spiced, ground up, stuffed into a casing. How hard could it be?” But it’s one of these things where the minutiae of the technique can make a huge difference in the quality of the final product. It mainly comes down to the binding element, making sure that you have the right level of salt, and that the meat has been salted long enough that the proteins start to dissolve before you mix it. Making sure that you mix it right, and that you have the right ratio of fat to lean. And then also making sure that it stays chilled through the entire process.

And if any one of those things is off, your sausage doesn’t bind properly. And that’s what you find is the problem with most mediocre sausages. They could be flavored very well, they could be crazy and interesting, but if they’re not mixed properly they crumble instead of having that nice, juicy, snappy texture that I look for in a sausage. And so finding someone who can do that was hard.

There was also the consideration of creating a sausage restaurant that could be vegan-friendly.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So one of my goals from the beginning was: vegan items on the menu that aren’t vegan by omission, they’re just vegan by default, and they’re delicious. So we have a number of things like that, but the one that I was really excited about is a vegan doner kebab. And for that I worked with a company called Impossible Meats, they make a vegan ground-meat blend mostly out of wheat protein, but they add heme, which is a lot of what gives red meat its irony, bloody flavor. But it can also be derived from plant sources. It’s by far the best faux meat available. And so what we do is we spice it with Turkish spices — so cumin, urfa biber chilies, sumac.

And then we serve it as a — well, initially we were reforming it into a cylinder and doing it in front of one of those doner kebab spits that spins around, and you shave it off. But the fat in this stuff is coconut oil, and coconut oil melts at a slightly lower temperature than animal fat does, so the fat would end up melting out of it, and it would eventually just crumble off the spit. So that didn’t end up working. It would’ve been so cool if we could get that to work. Now we’re just forming it straight into hamburger-style patties, so all the flavor is there.

DUBNER: Okay, so you talked about the food and the building, etc. What about the people? How involved were you in hiring and training up the kitchen and front of house?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I was very involved in back of the house, and finding good people is by far the hardest thing. So, when you’re living in a place like New York or San Francisco, where the cost of living is so high, finding great people is very hard. Even finding remotely reliable people. Even before we opened, when we were training staff, we must have lost probably 50 percent over the course of a few weeks.

DUBNER: Wow.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Which is not abnormal. One day we’re there and two of our cooks don’t show up. What do we do? One of them was on a bender and the other one was just a no-show. But then, luckily, the restaurant down the street, all the cooks there showed up that morning and the manager said, “We’re closing, and you don’t have a job anymore.” So, suddenly we had 12 cooks just walk up to the front door saying, “Hey, can we have a job?” So there’s never really a shortage of résumés and applicants, it’s finding reliable people that’s hard. What I’ve discovered in my years as a cook — and it played out exactly as expected here — was that it’s much better to hire people who give a s—, even if they have no previous experience or skills, than to hire someone who has a great résumé who doesn’t really understand the concept.

Our No. 1 kitchen hire is this guy Erik Drobey, who is a career changer, he was in his 40’s, he worked in an office job, always loved cooking on the side, was a Food Lab follower. He stopped by my house once to give me some sausages and sauerkraut he made because he was so proud of them. And they were great, I thought they were great. And then he said, “Hey, I think I’ve decided I want to be a cook. Would you give me a shot?” I’m like, “Absolutely.” Finding people who really care. That’s the key. Because you can always teach people skills, but you can’t teach people to give a s—.

DUBNER: And what about front of the house?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Front of the house is actually probably even a little bit harder at the start, because you have to really dangle this carrot in front of them because during training and during the first month that we were doing friends and family meals, people are working and they’re getting paid, but they’re not getting the same tips that they would. And so they have to realize, “Okay, I’m putting in this work now. So in a month I’ll be making much more money.” But it’s hard to find people who are willing to think about that.

DUBNER: So shortly before opening, you tweeted — in all caps, by the way — “Opening a restaurant is insane. And I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would choose to do it.” So what’s going on in the weeks and days just before opening?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I can tell you what was in my head when that tweet went out. It was not actually related directly to the restaurant itself, it was more about its toll on my personal life, and particularly my family life and my marriage, because a restaurant is a harsh mistress. During those three months I was in there, I would wake up, take my daughter to daycare, go to the restaurant from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m., go pick up my daughter from daycare, bring her home, put her to bed, and then go back to the restaurant from 8:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m. It had been two-and-a-half months where I had been basically never at home. I saw my daughter for a few hours a day, but I basically never saw my wife.

We lost the chance to sit down and talk together. The only time I ever saw her was when we were with our daughter, so we never really had any alone time, which is very difficult when you’re raising a child, to not be able to talk to your partner, not even have the time to talk about things related to raising the child. And the worst part of it was that no matter how well you plan, and you think to yourself, “Right, this is the amount of work I’m going to have to put into this restaurant, and I’m just going to say no after that,” it’s really hard to say no when there’s 40 people whose jobs rely on you making this a success.

Finally, Wursthall was ready for its soft opening — investors, friends and family.

LÓPEZ-ALT: About 100 people, and everything was great. We had completely gutted the old bathrooms, retiled them in this beautiful blue tile, really nice wallpaper with these hand pen-and-ink-drawn animals and stuff. It was a really nice bathroom. And the first night we had 100 people in, the toilets backed up, stopped working. And we had to shut down the bathrooms. And as it turns out, the waste line leaving one of the toilets had never been repaired or replaced in probably decades and decades and had a huge sag in it. So we had to close for two weeks so that they can rip out all the tile we just put in, dig into the foundation, replace that. All of a sudden, we thought we were going to be ready to open the next week and now it’s like another two weeks and another 30 grand to fix the bathroom that we had never even considered might be a problem.

* * *

Kenji López-Alt, rock star of the food-writing world, decided after years on the sidelines to get back into the restaurant business with a place called Wursthall, in San Mateo, California, which started out as a simple concept: a German beer hall serving nouveau-ish sausages.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I was always one of these “I’d rather have influence and bring joy to people than have a lot of money” type-of-career people, you know? And if the money comes along with it, then that’s great as well. But I’d rather just be doing something I love.

DUBNER: Okay, so walk us through opening night, and I’m sure everything went exactly as it was planned, and everybody was thrilled, and it was perfect. Yes?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, we had a sizable number of people in there and we were cooking food, people were ordering food, tickets were coming in, we were firing it. It was a disaster. Major, major disaster. Some people were waiting over an hour for their food. Some people never got their food. It’s the kind of night where we’re like, “These problems are insurmountable, how the f— are we going to fix this?” But we decided, “All right, we’ll focus on a couple of the big problems first.” When I tell them to you, they’re going to seem like stupid, small things. It’s like, “Well, why couldn’t you just do that?”

So, one of them was that we have sausages and you get your choice of topping. One of the problems was communicating to the cooks on the line. In case you’re not aware of how restaurant kitchens work, there’s a line, which is where all the stoves are, where the counters with the little cutting boards are, it’s where the cooks, the guys and girls are actually making the food. And then there’s a station called “expo,” the expediter, and the expediter’s job is to first of all act as a liaison between the front of the house and the back of the house. But, more importantly, the expediter’s job is to coordinate everybody in the back of the house so that dishes come out at the same time, so that everyone in the back of the house knows what they’re doing. So, essentially, they’re the general managing the army back there.

On opening night, we had all the toppings back on the line, and I was expediting, and I was just calling out, saying, “All right, hot Italian with speck and cherry-pepper relish. One bratwurst with sauerkraut.” And it’s a lot of information to take in when you have a full restaurant, there’s 100 people there, and you’re cooking say, 25, 30 sausages at a time, and each one has their own designated topping. It’s a lot of information for the person on the line actually cooking it and plating it to take in. And so every single sausage had this huge delay, where they maybe go out with the wrong topping on it and we’d have to re-fire it, or they would yell out and everything is really noisy, and we can’t hear each other.

And once you have these tiny little problems, that can lead to huge, huge backups, because the customers — they don’t care what problems you have back there. Once they’re seated, they want to start ordering food. And they don’t care that you already have a full board of tickets and that the grill is completely full. They don’t care that you screwed up one order and you have to re-fire it. Those tickets are just going to keep coming and coming and coming. So you have the ticket printer machine that’s spitting out these tickets constantly, and you’re constantly struggling to try and catch up with it. And that puts more and more stress on you. So you make more mistakes, the people on the line make more mistakes. And it can be these tiny little things that add to the likelihood of making a mistake that can throw a wrench in the entire operation, and that’s essentially what happened that first night.

So, the second night, what we did was we took those toppings, we took them off the line, and put them next to the expediter’s station, next to my station, so that all they had to remember was which sausages they were cooking. They would pass the sausages to me, right before I handed it to the server, I would put the topping on. I had the ticket right in front of me, it was easy for me to read it. And that smoothed things over unbelievably so. A couple of seconds of extra work on the cook’s part, it translated from a sausage taking over an hour to get to a customer, because there was this huge backlog of tickets, to customers getting their sausages in about eight minutes.

There was another major problem they discovered only on opening night.

LÓPEZ-ALT: And it’s one that we didn’t resolve until relatively recently.

It had to do with the pretzels.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, I’m also partner at a bakery called Backhaus and they make all of our pretzels and all of our bread. Really wonderful pretzels, but we serve them hot. So we were trying to figure out, “How do we get these pretzels that were baked that morning and delivered to us, how do we serve them hot and fresh?” And the obvious thing is, “All right, well, when someone orders a pretzel, put it in the oven, let it get hot, and then we serve it.”

This was a problem in a couple different ways: one of them was that Backhaus, they were salting their pretzels before they came to us. And what happens with pretzel salt is that it draws out moisture from the pretzels, so after eight hours or so, some of the moisture from the pretzels beads up on the surface of the pretzels and then it leaves kind of a splotchy wet marks, which is not good, and the salt is all gone. So we’re like, “Okay, so we have to salt our pretzels,” so that’s adding another layer of stuff we have to do. And the only oven that we have back on the line is next to the fry station, and the fryer is extremely busy with potatoes and we also do a chicken schnitzel sandwich. Adding pretzels on top of that to him became very difficult. So, for the early nights, we were firing pretzels to-order in the oven. And that was another one of those things that seemed like it’s a thing that takes two seconds, but it just piled onto the likelihood that we were going to screw something up.

So what was the pretzel-salting solution?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, we found a much more efficient way of salting them. So, one of the cooks had this idea to take a squeeze bottle, cut off the top until it was big enough that pretzel salt could flow through it. Now what we do is we just spray the pretzels and draw a line, trace the outline with the squeeze bottle, and that clears up all the space.

DUBNER: So what you just described, plainly these are things that most people eating at restaurants would never ever think about.

LÓPEZ-ALT: And they shouldn’t have to think about it.

DUBNER: But you have to think about it! But, as you’re describing it, it strikes me that you being who you are, and the way that you like to work, and the way that you do take an empirical and scientific approach to food and cooking and so on, that you were driven to solve these problems and get it right. Is that often the difference between a restaurant that works and one that doesn’t, which is that you have to be driven to constantly adjust, solve problems like that, that are going to come up? Do most restaurants really try as hard as you just described?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Most restaurants really try as hard. Any good chef cares deeply about the quality, and any good restaurant owner cares deeply about the quality of what they’re putting out. So I don’t think I’m unique in that regard at all. Me and my partners, Tyson and Adam, we have a lot of sit-down meetings where we analyze problems and try and solve them. So, maybe we do that a little bit more than other restaurants, but that’s my skill. I’ve worked for chefs that seem to have an innate skill to just be able to figure things out on the fly, or be able to work harder and faster to be able to solve those problems. People will attack those problems in different ways. But any good restaurant owner is going to recognize those problems and try and solve it in their own way.

DUBNER: I’m curious how much you pay attention to reviews of any sort. If you had opened a restaurant 10, certainly 20 years ago, there’s so much less feedback then, and now, some people feel swamped by it. Some people feel a lot of it is disingenuous. I know you said in the past that Yelp, in fact, this is from a tweet of yours: “Yelp is and has always been the worst place to look for decent reviews. Shady business practices, reviews by people who I know nothing about and have no reason to trust their opinion, even on the off chance they actually dined at the restaurant you’re rating.” So talk about that for a minute, your experience with Yelp and/or other online reviews.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, it’s difficult to gain value from them for me.

DUBNER: You mean as a consumer or a producer?

LÓPEZ-ALT: As a consumer. To some degree, as a producer there is a little bit of value to it. But, especially if you start looking at trends and see, all right, people that are complaining, what are they complaining about? At the beginning when we opened, it was service. And that was some very legitimate feedback on that.

DUBNER: You didn’t need online reviews to know that was a problem, I gather, right?

LÓPEZ-ALT: There’s very little that I’ve read, I’ve seen in Yelp, that we didn’t already realize was a problem. As a consumer of Yelp, I find Yelp useful as a map of what restaurants are around, but it’s hard to trust opinions. A very good professional review, you don’t necessarily have to agree with the reviewer’s point of view on what is good and what’s not, but if you have an idea of what they think is good, then they tell you whether this restaurant met those expectations, and then you can sort of gauge, “All right, well, do I agree with whether that’s good or not?” And that’s what a good restaurant review will do. Whereas on Yelp, it’s like someone, BasicUser12345, says “this restaurant was terrible, the potatoes sucked.” Well, I don’t know what you define as good potatoes, so how is that helpful to me?

DUBNER: But the problem is that everybody eats, right? So everybody considers themself a legitimate critic, which, you can’t totally discount that fact, can you?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No, no you can’t. But at the end of the day, I’m involved in this project because I want to be, I want to have my name on it. I want to be proud of what we’re putting out. At some point you just have to stick to your guns and say, “This is what I believe is good. And I’m not going to change that just because some people say they disagree that it’s good.” And if your idea of what is good is so far off from what most people think is good, then maybe you’re in trouble and you’re going to go out of business. But I’m of the mind that I’d rather lose a little business and stick to what I believe is true than to just pander to everybody to try and make the most money, which is hard to explain to partners and investors. But at the end of the day, as a food writer, I think I do have a pretty good pulse of what people think is good.

DUBNER: Right. So overall on Yelp, Wursthall is doing pretty well. Averaging about three-and-a-half out of five stars. So let me read you one Yelp review and hear your response.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Ok, I honestly haven’t looked at Yelp reviews since, like, the second month after we opened, so we’ll see, all right.

DUBNER: This is from just over a month ago. This is from Andrew R. He writes, “I was really disappointed. I expected more. Not that I had high expectations. They were modest, honestly. But it fell below that bar as well. For one, the service was not that great. For two, the food just isn’t that good. It’s okay. Like, you would eat it if you were hungry. But another sausage would probably satisfy you more. And I like a split-top bun because you can grill both sides like they do here. But when it’s split only halfway down there’s a lot of bread with no meat at the bottom. And that’s terrible. Cut that bun all the way down. It’ll be better. Trust me.” So, that’s Andrew R. What does Kenji L. say?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well, I’ll start from the end of it and work back. Believe it or not, we tested how far to cut the bun extensively before opening. And trust me when I say it’s not better to cut it too far, because the buns end up falling apart. It doesn’t stand right. That sounds all fair, I mean those seem like legitimate concerns. If I was at the restaurant, I would definitely love to talk to him and get a little more details about exactly what they were disappointed with. What is it about the sausage that you didn’t like? And to his point about sausages being not great: I fully admit sometimes, like any restaurant or any business, we have consistency issues now and then, and we work our best to make sure that those don’t happen. And every day gets better.

DUBNER: Here’s a professional review, this is Peter Lawrence Kane on SF Weekly. He writes, “The quality of the food is high, and it is consistent. The thing is, considering López-Alt’s eminently well-deserved reputation for being a demystifier of culinary techniques, Wursthall falls a little short of the gosh-wow factor longtime fans might clamor for. Maybe that’s not entirely fair. After all, it’s exactly what it claims to be.” What’s your take on that, Kenji?

LÓPEZ-ALT: So, I fully agree with that. This is again one of those things where it’s like what happened to the restaurant between the initial concept and between what customers expect. And, the initial concept was, “All right, we’re going to serve some damn good sausages. We’re going to make our own sauerkraut. It’s going to be good sauerkraut, but it’s still sausages and sauerkraut.” And there’s only so far that can go, as far as gosh-darn-wow factor. This is one of those things where the concept of the restaurant on paper turned out very different from what the restaurant is now. Once my name got attached to it and started bringing the media attention to it, it turns out people are coming there for dinner. They’re not coming there to drink. So, we started as a beer hall, but we’re not really a beer hall anymore. We’re a restaurant. And so that’s been one of the challenges since opening, coming to terms with that and realizing, “You know what? Some of the stuff we initially thought isn’t going to work, because customers are coming in with different expectations.” Any restaurant takes a while to find its legs. I think for us maybe it’s taking a little bit longer just because it was such a big shift from what we had initially planned compared to what customers perceive.

DUBNER: I see that — maybe yesterday, or within the last little while, you tweeted — a new menu item that’s starting soon. Maybe maybe it’s already started by now.

LÓPEZ-ALT: Starting today. I was at the restaurant all morning training the staff and making making sure the cooks knew how it worked.

DUBNER: So, this is tomato mayo toast with grilled corn vinaigrette and a corn soup, paprika oil and shishito peppers. So that’s not what I think of as beer-hall food. Was it the clientele who drove it primarily? In other words, were people confused when they came originally because they know your name and they think it was going to be more of a sit-down, knife-and-fork situation?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I think that’s part of it. I definitely saw comments saying, like, “I expected the menu to be a little more Kenji than what it is.” Because it’s sausages, and I don’t write that much about sausages. I don’t eat that many sausages. I like them. And we cook them well, but it doesn’t exactly scream “Kenji” or “Food Lab” or whatever. So, yes, part of this revamping process has been, “How do we make this menu more me?”

DUBNER: So from what I’ve read, you own 12 percent of the restaurant and 20 percent of anything else with these partners?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s something like that. That’s ballpark correct.

DUBNER: Would you have had the same share of ownership had you just acted as a sort of consulting-founding chef, as opposed to roll up your sleeves fully involved?

LÓPEZ-ALT: No. My partners are actually very understanding of the entire situation and the fact that I’ve now got more involved than I was planning on. Initially it was it was going to be basically just a fee plus a smaller percentage of ownership.

DUBNER: The big question I have then really is, so far, do you feel overall that it’s worth it? Another way of putting that is, if I came to you tomorrow, Kenji, with an idea that you liked, an idea for a restaurant, maybe a site for a restaurant, and a potentially worthwhile partnership, what do you do? Do you succumb? Or do you refrain this time?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I would say the restaurant on its own, in a bubble, detached from every other part of my life, was absolutely worth it. I don’t mind putting in hours and hours and hours of work even for little to no — I haven’t made any money off this restaurant yet, and I don’t plan on making any money for a while, until we pay off our investors. But we don’t live in a vacuum. So if someone came to me right now and asked me if I want to do this restaurant again, I would probably say no. Only because it cost me three months of being with my daughter. And that was a price that I wasn’t expecting to have to pay at the beginning, and one that made me deeply sad as it was happening, and also in retrospect. I don’t regret anything I did with the restaurant. I do regret how it affected my personal life and my family. But we learned those lessons.

DUBNER: Okay, final question. Let’s say that — maybe this is when your daughter is in school, when your daughter is in college even — but let’s say I come to you and I want you to work with me to open a new restaurant. What is the dream concept? Whether it’s cuisine or style or location. What is the restaurant that you absolutely would sacrifice again almost your entire life to do?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It would be something much smaller than Wursthall. So, we’re opening a couple more Wursthalls in the coming years, but we’ve talked about other restaurant concepts as well, and if we were to work on something together again, we would do something much smaller. The idea I’ve been throwing out at them is a Korean fried chicken sandwich place, which is a recipe that I’ve done at a number of pop-ups, I think is extremely delicious, but it’s essentially chicken brined in kimchi juice and then done Nashville hot chicken style. But instead of the Nashville hot chicken oil that goes on there, we make a sauce with Korean chili flakes and a bunch of Korean flavors, and it’s super delicious and the kind of thing that I think would do well as a fast-casual thing. That would basically be it for me. I want to feed a lot of people and make them happy. I don’t want to open an ego restaurant. I don’t want people to come to worship at the altar of Kenji López-Alt, come for this experience. I want a place that people say, “Hey, that’s a f—ing good sandwich. I’m going to have that once a week.”

We had that conversation with Kenji López-Alt back in July. And we caught up with him again a few weeks ago, for an update.

DUBNER: So first of all, I’m just curious: how is life?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Life is great now. At home I found a much better balance between restaurant and home life after that sort of craziness of opening. We’ve hired some more people in to help fill some management voids in the restaurant, which means that I get to spend a lot more time with my daughter and working on my other projects without having to freak out about what’s going on at the restaurant.

DUBNER: Did your marriage recover from the stress of opening?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Yeah it’s definitely in much better shape. And I have a much better understanding of what it means to overcommit myself to things. Yes, everything on that front is going much better.

DUBNER: Okay, and then importantly: how’s Wursthall going?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Wursthall is going well. I think the last time we talked, we were in this position where it was having a little bit of an identity crisis, because we had planned for it one way at the beginning, and then people were coming and expecting something different, and so we’ve been slowly trying to push it in that direction. And we’ll have completely transitioned our menu into a more sit-down experience, fork-and-knife, all that. But things are going well. We’ve never had trouble getting people in the door. We’ve never had trouble with revenue per se — the trouble has always been with profit. Maybe that’s true with most businesses. So, that’s been our concern for the last six months or so: all right, we’re making this money, we get people in the door — how do we actually turn that into profit so that we can actually start breaking even and making money and paying back our investors and all that?

DUBNER: So a lot of economists would say, “Well, the first and probably second and third and fourth steps toward bridging the revenue-profit gap would be very, very, very, very, simple, especially since you said that the demand is really strong. Right? You’re not having any trouble filling it, just raise prices.” So why not do that?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well part of it is our goal is to make sure that families and neighborhood people can come in and feel good about coming in. And as it is right now, I would say among our top three complaints is price already, so part of our goal especially with these new menu changes, is how do we give people an experience that they are willing to pay a little bit more for that they still see value in? And, originally with the menu the problem was everything came on a bun. And there is a limit to what people will pay for a sandwich and what people feel comfortable paying for a sandwich. Despite the quality of the ingredients inside, despite the amount of labor that goes into all that, there’s a certain amount you can charge for a sandwich and people will not pay any more. That’s not the case with fork-and-knife plates. People see more value in a fork-and-knife plate. We do this chicken schnitzel sandwich. We could just take off the bun and serve the exact same plate and charge $4 more for it, and people wouldn’t bat an eye.

The restaurant’s original concept, you’ll recall, was German-beer-hall-goes-to-California.

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s still a California beer hall. We still have sausages and German-themed things.

But customers who were fans of Kenji López-Alt’s food writing were expecting a menu that was more Kenji-fied. And so it has become more Kenji-fied. They’re serving a cacio e pepe …

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s like a quick Roman version of macaroni and cheese.

But with Germanic noodles rather than Italian.

LÓPEZ-ALT: So it’s our house spaetzle that we pan fry in brown butter, which is the traditional way to do spaetzle.

Also: smash-burgers and Korean-style fried chicken.

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s something we resisted at the beginning: should we do a burger? People know me for the burger, but do we need another place that serves a burger? And then we just decided, “Yeah, people want a burger. It’s good. People are going to order it, let’s just do it.” That and the fried chicken are probably our two top sellers. Once we got past that mental hurdle of being like, we don’t have to be strictly German, it was a pretty easy call at that point. Like, fried chicken and burgers — people love making them, they’re easy to prep, and they’ll help with this profit problem because both of them are high-profit dishes, compared to sausage, which are among are lowest-profit dishes because they take so much more work.

DUBNER: So you mentioned that one of the biggest problems is just personnel and turnover, both in the kitchen and front of the house, and I’m just curious to hear how you’re doing on that front with retention.

LÓPEZ-ALT: We have a number of people have been around since the very beginning. There was a bit of turnover when we changed executive chefs. I recently hired a new executive chef, and so when that management change happened, there was turnover. But we were expecting it because people are loyal to their bosses. But things seem to be settling down again.

DUBNER: Why did you need a new one?

LÓPEZ-ALT: It’s not that our previous chef was bad at his job. It’s just that the needs that we had in terms of efficiency and really managing the volume that we were doing was just something that he didn’t have experience at. Oh, one thing I should mention that actually really helped with our staff morale when these changes were happening is that we hired a translator, which I think is good advice for any business that has a lot of employees that aren’t very fluent in English. So we hired someone to come in for an entire day and we scheduled every Spanish-speaking employee to come in and sit down.

DUBNER: So it was really about communication to understand the flow of work and so on?

LOPEZ-ALT: No, it was less about the flow of work and more about the management change, the new chef, and the transition in menu. But a lot of it is also to get their feedback and to find out what they needed from us in order to be happy in their work.

DUBNER: Okay, really important question: how are the toilets holding up now?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Toilet situation’s fine. We put in the money to do the big fix, and it’s all it’s all fine.

DUBNER: So I understand that you’ve also, in the midst of all this, put yourself and the restaurant in the middle of a MAGA controversy. You tweeted, in response to public events in D.C., you tweeted, “It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served. Same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.” So, that’s what you tweeted. What happened next?

LÓPEZ-ALT: What happened next was — well, nothing for a few days and then it got picked up by some newspapers and then went around national news. And that’s when trouble happened. It was a mistake on a number of fronts for me to say that. The first one and the one that I was really concerned about was, it was a mistake the way I treated my staff and my partners, because that’s my personal Twitter account. It was something I said off the cuff and I never talked to my partners about it. And I realized afterwards that I just put my partners and especially my staff in a really tough position. Because now there’s all this anger being directed at them, and they had nothing to do with it. It was just me shooting off my mouth.

The other thing I want to say is that people very fairly read that as an attack on individuals, and as an attack on themselves after reading it, an attack on Republicans. And I can understand why it was read that way. And all I can say is that in my head it was really not about individuals. It is about the symbol, the symbol of the hat. I very admittedly live in a liberal bubble, I live in the Bay Area. I obviously I get exposed to a lot of people from around the country, including my family. And if you go just outside the Bay Area, of course there’s lots of right-wing people, lots of Republicans. And I get along fine with everyone. But, when you see that hat at rallies where there’s hateful things being said, or you see that hat being worn by people who are doing hateful things, it comes on to take a specific meaning that makes me uncomfortable. I guess my big regret as it came out in the way that closed down discussion as opposed to opening discussion.

DUBNER: You said it caused a lot of anger. Were people in your restaurant, whether partners or employees, were they angry because it endangered their livelihood, or were they angry on a level beyond that?

LÓPEZ-ALT: To be honest I don’t really want to talk about my partners or my staff — I don’t want to bring any of that up again, because I’ve already put them in an uncomfortable position. It’s been tough. I’ve been realizing that I’m in this position where I want to have my cake and eat it too. I’m a normal guy. I feel just like any other schlub on the Internet. I spend my days doing normal-people things, puttering around the house and fixing things and repairing the furnace. And I’ll just talk the way I talk on the Internet. But then, especially in the last couple of years, I have this platform and it’s my responsibility to use it. And that’s an impulse control thing, and that’s something my wife tells me all the time, like, “You can’t do this, because whether you want it or not, you’re well-known and you can’t just talk like this, because it’s going to get us in trouble. It’s not just about getting you in trouble, it’s going to get our family in trouble.” It is something that I very consciously have been thinking about. This year, I made a New Year’s resolution that if I make any kind of political comments, that I won’t respond back to commenters.

DUBNER: How are you doing with that resolution?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Good. Actually, I’m pretty much zero in terms of responding back. I also promised I wouldn’t make any more ad hominem attacks on social media, which, the one time I broke that was when I made an ad hominem attack against everybody who wears a MAGA hat, and that got me into trouble.

Soon enough, López-Alt will be taking a break from America and its politics.

LÓPEZ-ALT: I’m actually planning with my wife and my daughter — we’re going to be taking three months in Colombia. The idea is researching a book on Colombian cuisine, written for an American audience, which doesn’t really exist right now.

DUBNER: And where does your passion for that cuisine come from?

LÓPEZ-ALT: Well my wife is Colombian, and we spend a lot of time down there and it’s a huge country, hugely varied in terms of geography and culture and cuisine — there’s the Andes, there’s coastal regions, there’s plains, there’s rainforest, there’s deserts — with widely varied cuisine as well, that I think is under-represented and I feel like I have a good inside track on that.

DUBNER: What happens if or when the next time you open a restaurant — how do you come into it thinking differently, knowing now what you know?

LÓPEZ-ALT: I take less on myself. I delegate more. I think I spend more time figuring out the personnel issue as opposed to the fun-concept issue and figure out how do we make this happen where I don’t have to upturn my life and give up everything else to do it. And if I can’t do it, then that just means I won’t do it. I’ve come to this place where — when the first restaurant — when the opportunity came to me it was like, I don’t want to die thinking, “What if? This is an opportunity to do something I’ve always thought about doing, it wasn’t a lifelong dream, but I’ve thought about doing it, I should do it.” And at this point, you know what? I don’t need to do it again. If the opportunity comes up and I can find a way to ensure that I don’t have to upend my life again to do it, then I would. But I’m perfectly content saying no.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalsky, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

J. Kenji López-Alt, chef, restauranteur, and food writer.

RESOURCES

The Food Lab by James Kenji López-Alt (W. W. Norton & Company 2015).

EXTRA

Wursthall, 310 Baldwin Ave, San Mateo, CA 94401.

“Food + Science = Victory!” (Freakonomics Radio, Nov. 5, 2015).

The post Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Ep. 347 Update) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/kenji-update/

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