#I was a waitress in porridge (I was 5)
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thatboleyngirl77 · 3 months ago
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I FOUND THE SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE SCHOOL PRODUCTIONS I DID IN PRIMARY OH MY GOD
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AND WHEN I TELL YOU I REMEMBERED EVERY LYRIC AS SOON AS I HEARD IT. IT WAS LIKE MUSCLE MEMORY OR SOMETHING
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formeryelpers · 2 years ago
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Min Min Pie House, 405 W Main St, Alhambra, CA 91801
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Remember Beijing Pie House? Min Min Pie House is similar…they have the same type of Chinese meat pies (they’re called pancakes on the menu yet the name of the restaurant is pie house). Min Min Pie House also has Chinese breakfast (soy milk, porridge), noodles, dumplings, potstickers, steamed buns/bao, won tons, etc. You can buy frozen dumplings too.
They seem understaffed and the food also takes awhile to cook. They might even be making the meat pies to order? The waitress was behind the counter making meat pies! I’m sure they have to take awhile to cook too because both sides are golden brown.
Lamb & green onion pancakes (4 pancakes per order, $13.99): If you like Sheng Jian Bao (SJB), you will like these meat pies, aka xian bing. The dough is thicker than the XLB but not as fluffy and thick as the SJB. It’s more like the dough they make scallion pancakes out of. The wrapper is stuffed with ground meat and sealed. It looks like a hockey puck. It’s pan-fried on both sides. It’s as juicy as XLB and SJB but crispier than both. Also the wrapper is chewy where it isn’t crispy. The pancakes were generously stuffed with ground lamb and green onion. Super juicy, crispy, chewy. They’re worth waiting 25 minutes for. Two pancakes were enough for lunch. I had one later and while the juice had absorbed into the dumpling, it was still really good.
Soy milk: Good, hot, unsweetened, not scorched tasting, generous portion for $2.49
The service was minimal. Someone handed me a menu, took my order, and brought my food. Patrons helped themselves to water. When I asked for a takeout container, she pointed to the pile of takeout containers. I can’t really fault her though, because she was busy making dumplings and meat pies.
The décor is homey. You can recognize some elements of the old Tea Barrel. It’s a smallish place with half a dozen tables. Condiments and utensils are kept at each table. Online ordering available.
5 out of 5 stars
By Lolia S.
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ladyshadowqueen · 6 years ago
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1, 91, 95
1: 6 of the songs you listen to the most?
1. The Descent- Bastille 
2. Monster- dodie 
3. What Baking Can Do - Waitress
4. I Go Crazy - Orla Gartland 
5. Sucker- Jonas Brothers
6. The Village - Wrabel 
(at least thats what it is currently)
91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and whats even cooler is that they endow you with the superpower of your choice! What is that power?
okay this is a sidenote but i actually have eaten radioactive porridge before lmao
i would want the power to pause time 
95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?
i would go to New York so that i could meet bertiebertthepom (im so mad at myself that i didnt go meet him when i went to new york in the summer)
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forkfridge91-blog · 6 years ago
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Eastern Med Cred At Barzaari, Chippendale
It's old friends meet new ones at a dinner at Chippendale's brand new Barzaari restaurant. Taking up residence where Kensington Street Social used to sit, Barzaari serves up delightful eastern Mediterranean flavours in a modern setting.
If Barzaari sounds familiar, you are not wrong. There is already a Barzaari in Marrickville and Miss America and I had visited there years ago when it first opened. Miss America's flatmate works at Barzaari and let him know that there is now a new Barzaari in Chippendale. It would be the perfect central location for dinner with Miss America, Queen Viv, Ivy, Ryan, Mr NQN and I.
The chef behind the pass at Barzaari is former Quay chef Darryl Martin who has partnered with his Barzaari Marrickville business partner Andrew Jordanou as well as Singapore businessman Loh Lik Peng. And while the Marrickville Barzaari will remain, the menu at the Chippendale branch is a slightly more upmarket offering.
Beetroot amuse bouche
Our meal gets off to a delicious start with these beetroot amuse bouches. This is sweet and slightly vinegary beetroot on crisp biscuit with dried beetroot powder on top.
Flathead felafel fish fingers
Then comes another bite from the kitchen. The flathead felafel fish finger isn't on the menu but I hope it ends up there as they are such a tasty mouthful (or two). They are fingers of flathead wrapped in crunchy felafel with aioli on top sprinkled with sumac and sesame seeds. They are a resounding hit with everyone.
From left: Purple Confusion $23, Black Betty $21, Pineapple Hill $21
We order a round of cocktails for Ivy, Miss America, Mr NQN and I (Queen Viv has bubbles and Ryan is on water due to jetlag). My pick is a Black Betty as I was drawn to the name. It's made with mezcal, blackberry, mandarin, rosemary, lime and agave. Miss America has an Orange Orange with Blanco Tequila, spiced honey, orange lemon and a cute little ice cup filled with pomegranate arils (there was a misunderstanding and they accidentally brought him an orange wine which is pictured above).
Orange Orange $19
Mr NQN has a Pineapple Hill with rum, spiced pineapple jam, mango, coconut cream and lime but my favourite is Ivy's Purple Confusion with Pisco, blueberries, mint, vanilla and lime. And yes we are those people that pass around cocktails so everyone can try them.
2 x Breads $5 each and four dips $4 each
Although there are lots of interesting small bites in the first section, we are unable to resist starting with classic bread and dips. We order two lots of the bread. There's a puffy pita spread with butter and black sesame seeds and a koulouri which is a round of sesame dusted bagel shaped breads not dissimilar to Turkish simit. This comes with cultured butter and black salt.
Koulouri bread
We pair these with one of each of the dips: labne, smoked eggplant, hummus and toum. I think we could have all happily eaten a whole bowl of garlicky, fluffy toum ourselves. The breads are also wonderful, both served warm and it causes Miss America to warn everyone to not fill up on bread. All the while while we are filling up on bread of course.
Raw Kingfish, peas, lemon jam, basil, falafel, sunflower $23
We ordered two items from the smalls section which are entree sized dishes. The raw kingfish is topped with fresh, sweet peas, lemon jam, basil, felafel and sunflowers. It's a light, refreshing dish courtesy of the lemon jam and the kingfish.
Zalatina $25
The last time we ordered pig's head Ryan kvetched about it and said that he would never have ordered it. So I noticed that when Ryan asked Ivy what this dish was she answered, "Pork" which is smart because you don't want to set him off about pig's heads. The zalatina is one of my favourite dishes. It's slow cooked and pressed meat from a pig's head served with green almonds that have a lovely pop to them, olive oil and a sweet, spicy sauce and a crisp flatbread. It's rich and gorgeous and the sauces add a sweet element that goes so well with the pork.
Beef Short Rib $40
I always get excited when I see beef short rib on a menu and this one is a beauty. The soft beef rib is topped with chermoula and has hummus on the side with salted sumac white onions all providing the unctuous meat with depth and contrasting flavours.
Roast Duck Breast $40
I don't usually order duck breast but the waitress really recommended this and I'm glad that we listened to her. The duck breast is tender with a lovely crispy skin. It comes as five slices of skin-on duck breast on top of a bed of Gazan rice porridge, bread and brown butter and Commandaria (Cypriot dessert wine similar to port) that gives it a sweet element that is so moreish.
Mother in law salad $16
I have to admit I sometimes order things for the name - the Black Betty cocktail for one and this mother in law salad being another. And while it's a simple enough concept, everyone loves this simple salad made with purple cabbage, white sesame seeds, maple mayo (can maple mayo be a thing everywhere mkay?) and caper leaves that have a very similar flavour to caperberries. It's creamy, crunchy and piquant at the same time and the perfect side to go with meats (and I want to make a version of this to go with Christmas dinner, yep I've already got my menu planned).
Brussels sprouts $14
The Brussels sprouts is a generous portion of crispy, halved Brussels sprouts on a layer of garlicky toum with molasses and coriander. This is also a fantastic side dish although slightly richer than the salad.
It's dessert time and have I mentioned how excited I get when I see a food trolley? Especially when its a sweets trolley. They wheel over the sweet trolley and we pick our sweets. There's rose loukouma or Turkish delight, orange blossom marshmallows, sesame macarons, candied orange peel and raspberry pate de fruits and sour green plums. However it can end up being an expensive exercise with all of our petit fours costing $42 all up as each piece is $3 (Miss America thought that it was $3 per person rather than per piece). They're nice but perhaps next time I'd choose just a couple of them and then go more for desserts because they are more elaborate and interesting.
Blistered Buttermilk Ricotta $17
Miss America and Queen Viv are too full to contemplate dessert but Ivy and I can squeeze in one. Since our waitress made excellent recommendations we went with her suggestion of the blistered buttermilk ricotta with a rose and rhubarb gelato, crumb and honeycomb. We love the interplay between the bruleed, rich cheesy base that reminds us of a knafeh and the rose and rhubarb gelato that gives it acidity and complexity. It's a gorgeous dessert and it gets a thumbs up from everyone. The honeycomb isn't even really needed in this.
They ask if we'd like a coffee-namely their sandpit coffee where they heat up Turkish coffee over a flaming hot sandpit. We demur, it's too late to drink coffee (I would be wired for days I think). But of course it's not too late to go have a glass of wine elsewhere!
So tell me Dear Reader, can you drink coffee at night without effect? And do you try other people's drinks or food or do you stick to your own?
This meal was independently paid for.
3 Kensington St, Chippendale NSW 2008 Tuesday to Saturday 12–11:15pm Sunday 11am–3pm Monday Closed 02 8277 8533 barzaari.com.au/
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Source: http://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/11/12/barzaari-chippendale/
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sawcolor91-blog · 6 years ago
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Eastern Med Cred At Barzaari, Chippendale
It's old friends meet new ones at a dinner at Chippendale's brand new Barzaari restaurant. Taking up residence where Kensington Street Social used to sit, Barzaari serves up delightful eastern Mediterranean flavours in a modern setting.
If Barzaari sounds familiar, you are not wrong. There is already a Barzaari in Marrickville and Miss America and I had visited there years ago when it first opened. Miss America's flatmate works at Barzaari and let him know that there is now a new Barzaari in Chippendale. It would be the perfect central location for dinner with Miss America, Queen Viv, Ivy, Ryan, Mr NQN and I.
The chef behind the pass at Barzaari is former Quay chef Darryl Martin who has partnered with his Barzaari Marrickville business partner Andrew Jordanou as well as Singapore businessman Loh Lik Peng. And while the Marrickville Barzaari will remain, the menu at the Chippendale branch is a slightly more upmarket offering.
Beetroot amuse bouche
Our meal gets off to a delicious start with these beetroot amuse bouches. This is sweet and slightly vinegary beetroot on crisp biscuit with dried beetroot powder on top.
Flathead felafel fish fingers
Then comes another bite from the kitchen. The flathead felafel fish finger isn't on the menu but I hope it ends up there as they are such a tasty mouthful (or two). They are fingers of flathead wrapped in crunchy felafel with aioli on top sprinkled with sumac and sesame seeds. They are a resounding hit with everyone.
From left: Purple Confusion $23, Black Betty $21, Pineapple Hill $21
We order a round of cocktails for Ivy, Miss America, Mr NQN and I (Queen Viv has bubbles and Ryan is on water due to jetlag). My pick is a Black Betty as I was drawn to the name. It's made with mezcal, blackberry, mandarin, rosemary, lime and agave. Miss America has an Orange Orange with Blanco Tequila, spiced honey, orange lemon and a cute little ice cup filled with pomegranate arils (there was a misunderstanding and they accidentally brought him an orange wine which is pictured above).
Orange Orange $19
Mr NQN has a Pineapple Hill with rum, spiced pineapple jam, mango, coconut cream and lime but my favourite is Ivy's Purple Confusion with Pisco, blueberries, mint, vanilla and lime. And yes we are those people that pass around cocktails so everyone can try them.
2 x Breads $5 each and four dips $4 each
Although there are lots of interesting small bites in the first section, we are unable to resist starting with classic bread and dips. We order two lots of the bread. There's a puffy pita spread with butter and black sesame seeds and a koulouri which is a round of sesame dusted bagel shaped breads not dissimilar to Turkish simit. This comes with cultured butter and black salt.
Koulouri bread
We pair these with one of each of the dips: labne, smoked eggplant, hummus and toum. I think we could have all happily eaten a whole bowl of garlicky, fluffy toum ourselves. The breads are also wonderful, both served warm and it causes Miss America to warn everyone to not fill up on bread. All the while while we are filling up on bread of course.
Raw Kingfish, peas, lemon jam, basil, falafel, sunflower $23
We ordered two items from the smalls section which are entree sized dishes. The raw kingfish is topped with fresh, sweet peas, lemon jam, basil, felafel and sunflowers. It's a light, refreshing dish courtesy of the lemon jam and the kingfish.
Zalatina $25
The last time we ordered pig's head Ryan kvetched about it and said that he would never have ordered it. So I noticed that when Ryan asked Ivy what this dish was she answered, "Pork" which is smart because you don't want to set him off about pig's heads. The zalatina is one of my favourite dishes. It's slow cooked and pressed meat from a pig's head served with green almonds that have a lovely pop to them, olive oil and a sweet, spicy sauce and a crisp flatbread. It's rich and gorgeous and the sauces add a sweet element that goes so well with the pork.
Beef Short Rib $40
I always get excited when I see beef short rib on a menu and this one is a beauty. The soft beef rib is topped with chermoula and has hummus on the side with salted sumac white onions all providing the unctuous meat with depth and contrasting flavours.
Roast Duck Breast $40
I don't usually order duck breast but the waitress really recommended this and I'm glad that we listened to her. The duck breast is tender with a lovely crispy skin. It comes as five slices of skin-on duck breast on top of a bed of Gazan rice porridge, bread and brown butter and Commandaria (Cypriot dessert wine similar to port) that gives it a sweet element that is so moreish.
Mother in law salad $16
I have to admit I sometimes order things for the name - the Black Betty cocktail for one and this mother in law salad being another. And while it's a simple enough concept, everyone loves this simple salad made with purple cabbage, white sesame seeds, maple mayo (can maple mayo be a thing everywhere mkay?) and caper leaves that have a very similar flavour to caperberries. It's creamy, crunchy and piquant at the same time and the perfect side to go with meats (and I want to make a version of this to go with Christmas dinner, yep I've already got my menu planned).
Brussels sprouts $14
The Brussels sprouts is a generous portion of crispy, halved Brussels sprouts on a layer of garlicky toum with molasses and coriander. This is also a fantastic side dish although slightly richer than the salad.
It's dessert time and have I mentioned how excited I get when I see a food trolley? Especially when its a sweets trolley. They wheel over the sweet trolley and we pick our sweets. There's rose loukouma or Turkish delight, orange blossom marshmallows, sesame macarons, candied orange peel and raspberry pate de fruits and sour green plums. However it can end up being an expensive exercise with all of our petit fours costing $42 all up as each piece is $3 (Miss America thought that it was $3 per person rather than per piece). They're nice but perhaps next time I'd choose just a couple of them and then go more for desserts because they are more elaborate and interesting.
Blistered Buttermilk Ricotta $17
Miss America and Queen Viv are too full to contemplate dessert but Ivy and I can squeeze in one. Since our waitress made excellent recommendations we went with her suggestion of the blistered buttermilk ricotta with a rose and rhubarb gelato, crumb and honeycomb. We love the interplay between the bruleed, rich cheesy base that reminds us of a knafeh and the rose and rhubarb gelato that gives it acidity and complexity. It's a gorgeous dessert and it gets a thumbs up from everyone. The honeycomb isn't even really needed in this.
They ask if we'd like a coffee-namely their sandpit coffee where they heat up Turkish coffee over a flaming hot sandpit. We demur, it's too late to drink coffee (I would be wired for days I think). But of course it's not too late to go have a glass of wine elsewhere!
So tell me Dear Reader, can you drink coffee at night without effect? And do you try other people's drinks or food or do you stick to your own?
This meal was independently paid for.
3 Kensington St, Chippendale NSW 2008 Tuesday to Saturday 12–11:15pm Sunday 11am–3pm Monday Closed 02 8277 8533 barzaari.com.au/
Source: http://www.notquitenigella.com/2018/11/12/barzaari-chippendale/
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wickerjulias · 8 years ago
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So I was tagged by two amazing people for this challenge, both from the ussfamily. I decided to do this in one post since I’m too lazy to create two separate ones. 
Rules: Answer 11 questions, think of 11 more questions (22 questions?? rip), tag 11 people
Questions from @imaginenterprise. Thanks a lot for tagging me!!
1. Were you a part of the pokemon go mania from last summer? Kinda? I mean, I was traveling around Salzburg with my best friend so I was super excited for it and played it a few times, but was always 10 levels behind everyone else.
2. Posters on walls or framed pictures/paintings? Both actually
3. Have you ever been skiing? Yes!! And I love it. Can’t wait for the next time!!
4. DIY or buy online? (this is a stupid one i’m sorry) (Nah, it’s not) Buy online. I love the DIY stuff, but I’m too impatient
5. Tea or coffee? Tea
6. Is your phone screen cracked/broken? Nope, and I’m v proud of it 
7. Day or night? Uhm ... Tough one. But night probably 
8. If you could live in any of the Star Trek series/movies universes, which one would you pick? That’s ... that’s just mean. You can’t do this to me! (AOS. It has Karl Heinz)
9. Have you ever been to Ikea? If yes, have you gotten lost? Yes and yes. It’s huge and confusing? (Fun fact: It took me more time to get out of an IKEA than getting out of an actual labyrinth.)
10. Do you play any musical instrument? Sadly not
11. Would ever take up learning latin? I need to do so actually. I need it for my studies
Questions from @stargirlhorse. Thank you v much for tagging me :D (I know you actually forgot to write the questions down on the post, so I’m gonna do it for you here)
1. What’s your name? Jessica, but I go by Jessy most of the time
2. What are you doing right now besides answering my pointless questions? Chatting w the ussfam and with friends
3. Fav emoji? 😍 😊 (this one looks v cute on my phone) 😱 👽 (<-- that’s Clark Kent) 🖖
4. Best friend(s)? Lisa, my wifey <3 (Kindergarten friend and now best bud ever, love her so much)
5. Celebrity crush? Too many, srsly. Henry Cavill, Alicia Vikander, Riz Ahmed, Lupita Nyong’o, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, ...
6. Horse or cow? Both!
7. Cat or dog? Both again
8. Favourite song? Atm Loverboy by You Me At Six
9. What are you/do you wanna be? I’m a trained chef and waitress, studying History. And I want to be a tourism guide.
10. Any pets you have? Three cats 
11. Pet peeve People reblogging posts without fact checking. That’s just ugh!!
While typing this post I got tagged by another ussfam member @spockstricorder. Thanks a lot!! (I gotta type more quickly jfc guys)
1. Favorite fictional character? Napoleon Solo (heart eyes mofo)
2. Analog or digital clocks? Both is good 
3. Favorite book/book genre? Redshirts and Six of Crows Fantasy, Si-Fi, Horror 
4. Have you ever traveled outside of the country you live in? Yep! I went to Scotland, England, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Turkey :D
5. Hot or cold weather? Depends ... I don’t like either if it’s too hot/cold
6. If you could live in any fictional world, what world would you live in? Phew ... Does the Mass Effect universe count? 
7. AOS or TOS? Error 404: Jessy not found
8. Would you rather live in a house or apartment of your own? Apartment! (Then I don’t have to take care of a garden lmao)
9. What languages do you speak other than your native language/what language would you like to learn? English, a little bit of Spanish, French and Italian.  All the languages!! Arabic, Russian, Vulcan (see what I did there?), Portuguese, etc.
10. What’s your major/what do you want to major in in university/college? History. Wouldn’t change a thing about it 
11. What’s your favorite comfort food? Porridge with bananas and honey
My questions Okay, first of all: I’m not gonna write 33 questions down lol Secondly: Well, I don’t actually have a second point 
1. What’s your favourite Star Trek character? 2. Do you play videogames? If yes, which one is your fave? 3. Favourite TV Series (besides Star Trek)? 4. When did you watch your first episode of Star Trek? 5. Fanfiction or books? 6. What’s the weirdest fact from the country you live in? 7. A movie you could watch over and over again? 8. What’s your opinion on muscials? Do you have a favourite one? 9. What’s your OTP?  10. Favourite animals? 11. Mountains or beach?
I tag the peeps from the ussfam: @taluhkk, @psock, @poedaremon, @thehotmessxpress, @spacekirk, @llap-ping, @tiberivs-kirk, @starry-eyed-spock, @spockstricorder, @adavinic, @andor-cassians, @listles, @stargirlhorse, @vulcanbangs, @raptor-squad-in-space, @winterspock, @bustghosters, @damerdone, @actual-chubbytranskirk and @bluespock.
And @jjohncho just cause.
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cqfox-blog · 5 years ago
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Hotpot is the most famous delicacy associated with Chongqing nationwide. No matter where you travel in China, you will almost certainly find a ‘Chongqing Huoguo (Fire wok) 重庆火锅’ restaurant in town.
There are countless avenues for us to explore with hotpot; the history, key ingredients, utensils, varieties, specialties, brands, social culture, homemade versions, entertainment, games, Chinese and local dialect terms, way too much to cover in a single post without making the reader’s head spin!
In light of this, I’m going to break down the culinary phenomenon of Chonqing hotpot into a series of bitesize themes, today’s being a matter of huge practical concern for overseas visitors, dealing with the menu!
For simplicity, I will picture the scenario where the tourist wanders into a common streetside hotpot restaurant, doesn’t know much Chinese, and isn’t familiar with ordering process.
You shouldn’t have any taxing issues with the upmarket brands, or at least they won’t give you much cause for headaches, so I intend to put these aside for today and focus exclusively on the ‘street’ hotpot experience.
Hang around through to the end, where I will share the most common hotpot menu items in both Chinese and English. I’m sure you will enjoy reading them, as perhaps one day turn them to practical use.
  Basic Steps
  On the surface, at least, the process of ordering hotpot itself is remarkably straight forward.
You walk in, then first tell the staff how many are in your party, since you might have more people coming to join you, for which you’ll need the right size of table and position.
Once a group of patrons have sat down, they will hand you one tickbox menu for the whole group to choose from. Depending on the occasion, a good host will allow the beneficiariesof his goodwill to select first. In a friendly gathering, there are no major formalities to worry much about.
Whilst you’re busy pondering over the menu, the chef will prepare your wok, then carry it through the aisles to your table, and heaven forbid drop or spill the contents! They will light the gas stove there and then, as it’ll take a while before it’s hot enough to cook anything.
You might find the waiting staff standing around to take the order if they’re not busy, and lots of foreign tourists may naturally feel a little uneasy, as if under pressure to hurry up.
The truth is you needn’t feel this way, it’s just the done way. They will wait for you, and might poactively recommend some dishes that you’re free to accept or decline. If you really feel uncomfortable, you can politely try out this phrase ‘请给我们几分钟考虑吧 Qing gei women ji fenzhong kaolv ba.’ Please give us a few minutes to think about it.
Once you’ve chosen, you hand the paper back, and they’ll do the rest. You can order extra later if you want, and they’ll just add it to the bill, no problem.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, yes, but with one almighty catch, being able to read and understand Chinese!
As well as enhancing cultural awareness, I hope my post comes in handy for the intrepid traveller one day!
  Back to the Past
  On my first independent ventures with fellow British friends back in 2003, the days before I knew Mandarin well, we were at a complete loss with the menus, and unable to communicate with the staff.
The only two solutions available at the time, apart from not going, were pestering strangers from another table for potential help, or have a waitress follow you around the restaurant and tick the menu as you point saying ‘I want one of those!’
Trying your luck at random choice is a highly risky tactic. Hidden among the palatable options are the likes of tripe, brains, duck intestines, gums, tongue, chicken’s feet, coagulated blood, plus a few exotic plants and mushrooms that foreigners aren’t necessarily used to eating.
Funny as it seems looking back, I expect you’ll want to avoid making a spectacle of yourself, or providing other patrons a source of great amusement. So, in my case, one of the top priorities after my arrival in Chongqing was to master the hotpot vocabulary. I took home a copy of all the menus, then painstakingly searched out the characters in a dictionary, one by one!
My efforts soon paid off. Though it took a while to memorise all the characters, I quickly managed to steer clear of the undesirable options by focusing on key words like Du肚 (Tripe), Xue血 (blood), Zhao爪 (Feet), Nao脑 (Brain) ecetera.
As in English, there a number of colloquialisms for the good old potato in Chinese, so you’ll have to learn a few alteratives for the same vegetable. The most common is ‘Tudou土豆,’ but menus often list them as ‘Yang-yu洋芋 (Foreign taro) or Ma-ling-shu马铃薯.
Interestingly, don’t always expect every Chinese member of staff to know each of these words for potato. I have known of people ordering ‘Tudou,’ only for the waiter to say there aren’t any, when in fact they’re on the menu under a different name!
Likewise, the popular and tasty lotus root slices are usually called ‘Ou-pian藕片,’ but are also known sometimes as ‘He-xin河心 (River hearts!).
Thankfully, most other foods tend to go by the same Chinese word, so potatoes are really the exception, not the rule, here.
  Translations of popular hotpot food
  Here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for!
The list below may be rather long, but I’m sure the sense of curiosity and and reactions to some of the more unusual items will carry you through to the end!
Waiting staff bring all of these dishes raw on plates, and the customers cook them in the boiling spicy wok.
There are a few Chinglish sounding expressions, so I have altered a few details to make them easier to understand.
Let’s see how many you’d like to try!
  火锅中英文菜单 Chinese-English Hotpot menu
  精品鹅肠 Special goose intestines
精品鸭肠 Special duck intestines
精品毛肚 Special tripe
(精品 jing-pin means special in the sense of high quality or house special)
麻辣牛肉 Spicy beef
香菜丸子 Meatballs served with cilantro
鲜牛鞭 Fresh ox penis
鹌鹑蛋 Quail eggs
美国肥牛 American fatty beef
鲜鹅肠 Fresh goose intestine
(Fresh as in not from the freezer)
鳝鱼 Eel
午餐肉 Spam meat/Luncheon meat (spam 是美国俗语)
无骨鹅掌 De-boned goose webs (Feet)
耗儿鱼 Corydoras
脑花 Brains
羊肉串 Mutton kebabs
羊肉卷 Sliced mutton
黄辣丁 Pelteobagrus fulvidraco fish
现炸酥肉 Deep-Fried Pork Fingers (Great as a starter)
鲜毛肚 Fresh tripe
腰片 Sliced kidneys
鲜鸭肠 Fresh duck intestines
鲜猪黄喉 Fresh pork trachea
千层肚 Thousand-layered tripe (Piled like lasagne in strips 千层面)
鲜鱼头 Fresh fish heads
虾饺 Shrimp dumplings
脆皮肠 Crispy intestine
鲜黄喉 Fresh trachea
白菜 Chinese white cabbage
豆芽 Beansprouts
鲜豆腐 Fresh Tofu
冬瓜 Winter gourd
藕片 Sliced lotus roots
土豆 Potatoes
木耳 agaric fungus
香菜 Cilantro
土豆皮 Potato skin
鲜鸭血 Fresh duck blood curds (A bowl of coagulated blood)
海带 Seaweed
青笋头 Green bamboo shoots
平菇 Shitake mushrooms
香菇 Champignon (Mushrooms)
贡菜 dried ballonflower
四川金针菇 Sichun Needle mushrooms
方竹笋 Square bamboo shoots
蛋炒饭 Fried rice with eggs
��油火锅 butter hotpot
秘制全白锅 House special white hotpot
清油鸳鸯锅 Clear-oil double-flavoured hotpot
牛油鸳鸯锅 butter double flavoured hotpot
(The above four are different kinds of bases for the wok soup. My suggestion is the partitioned spicy broth and bland soup, as meant by ‘double flavoured’)
香油碟 Sesame oil
特色菜 House special dishes 
荤菜 Meat dishes
素菜 Vegetarian dishes
小吃 Snacks
锅底 Soup base
油碟 Oil dish
火锅 Hot pot
茼蒿菜 Crown daisies (Plant)
莲藕片lotus root-pieces
冬瓜片Chinese watermelon-pieces
青笋片lettuce-pieces
鸭血 duck blood
平菇 Even mushroom
粉条vermicelli
牛百叶 stomach of the cattle
小羊羔肉 Lamb
肥牛 Fatty beef
肥肠 Pig’s colon
鱼丸 Fish meatballs
虾丸Shrimp meatballs
鳝鱼片 Eel strips
午餐肉 spam luncheon meat或spam
爽口嫩牛肉 Tender Beef
牛肉饺 beef dumplings
猪肉饺 pork dumplings
虾米饺 shrimp dumplings
龙须面 Fine noodles
麻花 fried dough twist (Hemp flour biscuits)
火腿肠 sausages
精品:House Special(意思是本店特色,言下之意就是精品了)
鹅:goose;
肠:intestine;
鸭:duck;
麻辣:spicy;
牛肉:beef;
香菜caraway;
牛肉丸:beef ball;
手工house-made(意思就是本店亲手制作),
里脊fillet,
嫩牛肉tender beef;
鲜fresh;
墨鱼仔cuttlefish;
美国肥牛:American beef,
蟹肉crab meat,
鳝鱼eel,
无骨:boneless;
火腿肠:sausage
猪脑花:pig brain,
羊肉串:lamb stick,
带鱼hairtail,
鳕鱼ling,
酥肉,fried pork,
腰片:sliced kidney,
无骨凤爪 boneless chicken paw,
大白菜cabbage,
豆芽bean sprout,
鲜豆腐fresh tofu,
冬瓜chinese watermelon,
藕片lotus root,
鱿鱼:squid,
虾饺shrimp dumpling,
土豆,patato,
黄瓜:cucumber,
木耳agaric,
血汪red tofu (Soup with blocks of coagulated blood)
海带seaweed,
年糕rice cake,
花菜cauliflower,
蘑菇mushroom,
竹笋bamboo shoot,
脆豆腐 crispy tofu,
蛋炒饭 egg fried rice,
八宝粥 Mixed porridge,
特色菜:Chef specialty,
荤菜:meat,
素材:vegetable,
小吃:snack
   Here are some more!
  1、红油锅底 Hot pot soup base (red chili oil)
2、清汤鸳鸯锅底 Dual hot pot soup bases(red chili oil and clear soup)
3、土鸡汤鸳鸯锅底 Dual hot pot soup bases(red chili oil and village chicken soup)
  4、野生菌锅底 Hot pot soup base (wild mushroom)
5、麻酱碟 Plate of sesame paste
6、香油碟 Plate of sesame oil
7、椒盐碟 Plate of pepper salt
8、鳝鱼 Short eel
9、尚席方竹笋 Square bamboo shoot of ShangXi
10、特色毛肚 Sepcial beef omasum
11、猪黄喉 Pig trachea
12、重庆酥肉 Chongqing fried pork
13、鸭胗花 Duck gizzard pieces
14、鸭胗片 Duck gizzard slices
15、腰花 Pork kidney pieces
16、腰片 Pork kidney slices
17、老肉片 Marbled meat slices
18、牛眼肉 rib eye beef
19、肥牛 Fat beef slices
20、内蒙羔羊肉 Inner Mongolia kidlet slices
21、羊上脑 Fillet of lamb
22、手切鲜羊肉 Fresh mutton slices
23、手切鲜牛肉 Fresh beef slices
24、牛毛肚 Beef omasum(black)
25、牛黄喉 Beef trachea
26、火腿肠 Ham sausages
27、泥鳅 Loaches
28、鱼丸 Fish meatballs
29、虾丸 Shrimp meatballs
30、牛肉丸 Beef meatballs
31、鹌鹑蛋 Quail eggs
32、猪脑 Pig’s brains
33、蟹肉 Crab meat
34、脆皮肠 Crispy sausages
38、带鱼 Frost fish
39、马面鱼 Horse-faced fish
40、花鲢鱼头 Spotted silver carp head
41、牛百叶 Beef omasum (white)
42、猪肉香菜丸子 Pork and parsley meatballs
43、羊肚 Lamb tripe
44、牛骨髓 Bovine bone marrow
45、无骨鸭掌 Boneless duck feet
47、黄辣丁 Yellow cartfish
48、午餐肉 luncheon meat
50、九尺鹅肠 Goose intestines (long)
51、肥肠 Pig’s colon
52、鸭舌 Duck tongues
53、竹荪 Bamboo shoots
54、草菇 Straw mushroom
55、金针菇 Golden mushroom
56、香菇 Black mushroom
57、平菇 Cap fungus
60、白菜 Chinese cabbage
61、圆白菜 Cabbage patch
62、粉丝 Vermicelli
63、土豆片 Potato slices
64、豆芽 Bean sprouts
66、宽粉 Wide Vermicelli
67、海带 Kelp stripes (Seaweed)
68、红薯片 Sweet potato slices
69、龙须面 Fine noodles
70、豆苗 Mung Beans
71、菠菜 Spinach
72、白萝卜片 Radish slices
73、冬瓜 Chinese watermelon
74、菜花 Cauliflower
75、茼蒿 Garland Chrysanthemum
76、年糕 Rice cakes
77、地耳 Nostoc commune
78、青笋叶 Asparagus leaves
79、油麦菜 Lettuces
80、腐竹 Bean curd sheet rolls
81、豆皮 Tofu skin
82、冻豆腐 Frozen tofu
83、白豆腐 Fresh tofu
84、蒿子杆 Garland chrysanthemum
85、鸭血 Duck blood
86、黄瓜 Cucumber
87、青笋条 Fresh Bamboo Shoots
88、藕片 Lotus Root slices
90、鲜山药 Fresh Cinnamomvine
91、四川麻圆 Si Chuan Sesame Balls
92、家乡叶儿粑 Cakes wrapped in leaves
93、香煎糍粑块 Fried Glutinous Rice Cake
94、鸳鸯小馒头 small buns in two flavors
95、香芋卷 Taro Rolls
96、醪糟小汤圆 Glutinous Rice Balls in Rice Wine
97、酱香蒸饺 Steamed Dumplings Seasoned with Soy Sauce
98、扬州炒饭 Yang Zhou fried Rice
99、担��面 Dandan noodles(top with chopped meatin soybean paste )
100、家乡泡菜 Pickled vegetables
101、米饭 White rice
103、鲜豆浆 Fresh soybean milk
104、柠檬茶 Lemon tea
105、鲜橙汁 Fresh orange juice
106、西瓜汁 Watermelon juice
107、青瓜汁 Cucumber juice
  Fun with Hotpot Menus Hotpot is the most famous delicacy associated with Chongqing nationwide. No matter where you travel in China, you will almost certainly find a 'Chongqing Huoguo (Fire wok) 重庆火锅' restaurant in town.
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marketingadvisorvietnam · 6 years ago
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Quang Binh, the land of caves, has so much more
Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://www.ticvietnam.vn/quang-binh-the-land-of-caves-has-so-much-more-5/
Quang Binh, the land of caves, has so much more
The magnificent cave systems in Quang Binh have justly hogged the limelight, but there are many other attractions to bask in.
The discovery of the Phong Nha Cave, and then the Son Doong Cave, firmly stamped the central province of Quang Binh on the world tourism map as a must-visit destination in Vietnam. The province soon came to be known as the Kingdom of Caves that has attracted many speleologists, explorers and travelers to visit it.
So far in 2018, the total number of visitors to Quang Binh reached 3.9 million, an increase of 18 percent over the same period last year, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).
Beautiful tourism farmlands and western streets have formed in the areas near the caves, but when we took three days off to explore the province, Quang Binh turned out to have far more attractions than suggested by catchy promotion headlines or high-definition photographs.
A panoramic view of Dong Hoi city. Photo by Shutterstock/Loner Nguyen
Downtown Dong Hoi
We took an overnight train departing from Hanoi to Dong Hoi city, the center of Quang Binh. A 30 something dollar fare for a round trip was far more reasonable than the airfare, so spending more time on the train journey was no problem.
The tiny train station welcomed us with unexpected professional services: free wifi, digital billboards and easily available taxi services. We started our adventure by reaching our homestay on Nguyen Du street, a road overlooking the Nhat Le river. Many good hostels offer accommodation at a very reasonable price here. Our triple-bed room cost us about $16 per day.
We chose the dry season, from April to August, to visit Quang Binh, when it is hot and sunny. In the September to March rainy season, we might miss our chance to see the vast white sand dunes, or be unable to enter the famous Phong Nha because of high water levels.
Nhat Le bridge at night, in Dong Hoi city. Photo by Shutterstock/Loner Nguyen 
Our first destination was the Nhat Le Beach, right in Dong Hoi city. We missed the sunrise, but the morning breeze on the beach provided welcome relief from the stuffy weather in the city.
Nhat Le beach was not very crowded, probably because it was not peak season yet. The dialect spoken indicated most of the people there were locals. There are no fancy cottages to rest in, cocktails to drink or exciting water sports to enjoy. All this made the beach even more attractive – just the waves and sand for everyone to enjoy. A rare treat, these days.
Da Nhay beach, thirty minute drive away from Dong Hoi city, Quang Binh province. Photo by Shutterstock/vivanvu
We had another beach on the day’s schedule. Thirty minutes in a taxi and we were at the Da Nhay Beach. The taxi driver had agreed on VND300,000 ($12.8) for a round trip. Very reasonable, considering he had to wait and drive us back.
Photo by VnExpress/Bao Ngoc
The Da Nhay beach (Dancing Rock) is strikingly beautiful, with its scattering of black rocks on white sands. We decided to skip swimming, climbed on to the rocks and listened to the waves crashing against the rock. We were looking to commune with nature, and this was happening in a great way.
Since eating out is a big part of a holiday, we were paying extra attention to our stomachs for the first signs of rumbling. A random choice from a row of restaurants on the street was our plan, when our taxi driver pitched in. “You must try the fish porridge here. It’s famous for it.”
What a meal that was! The waitress brought us a big pot of flawless white congee with fish slices and green onions. For about $10 dollars worth, the pot could satiate five people. When we returned to the taxi, we were fully recharged, and thankful for our driver’s advice.
Sand dunes and the sea
After two different kinds of beaches, we were headed to a third sea scenario, this time, one that involved the Quang Phu sand dunes.
Just 4 kilometers away from the city center, this sand dune stands on one side of the promenade that runs along the Nhat Le beach. Goes without saying that the route was very scenic. To our right was the emerald sea and on the left were the white sand dunes.
We stopped at a green tube house on the road that had a sign that said “sand slides”. Locals offer parking services and plastic panels that work like sleds on the dunes. We parked our bikes on the sidewalk, rented three thin plastic panels and climb up the sand dune without much expectation.
Quang Phu sand dune. Photo by Shutterstock/Thanh Le Duc 
The dune did not seem very high, but once we got to the top, the view stunned us for a moment. “It feels like we are walking in the desert, like the Little Prince”, Anh, my companion, cried out.
It was very cool. The wind blew against our face and hair as we slid down the dune, which was really fun. But visitors need to be careful not to carry belongings that can fall off and get buried in the sand right away.
Hungry again
All that “exercise” got us ready for our next meal and Dong Hoi City treats the visitor well, offering many central Vietnam specialties. As a coastal city, it has an impressive variety of seafood on offer, too. On the banks of the Nhat Le river are a succession of open-air seafood restaurants that presents this seafood variety in a variety of dishes. There are several mini food courts around the Dong Hoi and Ga market.
We had dinner at the Tu Quy restaurant on Co Tam street, gleefully filling our stomachs with Quang Binh specialties including the Vietnamese pancake banh xeo, rice cakes, noodles with grilled meat and rice rolls.
The caves, of course
The entrance of Phong Nha cave. Photo by Shutterstock 
You cannot visit Quang Binh and miss out on the province’s greatest pride: the caves. We chose to take a bus to the Phong Nha Cave by bus, a cheap 50km ride that is not advisable for people who do not know Vietnam well. A round trip taxi ride would cost you around VND400,000 ($17.17).
A boat ride is needed to reach the cave proper. A boat can accommodate 12 people, so it is better to share it to lower costs. The journey begins in the dark, a great experience on its own. The cave itself is a marvel, of course, the stalagmites formed over millions of years never failing to inspire awe.
Trekking inside the majestic Thien Duong (Paradise) Cave 
The Paradise Cave, around 70 kilometers from Dong Hoi city, is another must-visit site in Quang Binh province. We booked a day tour to visit Paradise cave and the Dark Cave – Chay river complex. The tour costs VND1.3 million ($55.83), all meals and ticket fees included. If you want to rent a round-trip taxi service to the cave, thrown in another VND600,000-700,000 ($25.76-30.06). Visitors may walk or rent an electric shuttle to reach Paradise cave’s mouth after getting off the boat.
“The men have gone abroad to work”, the boatwoman told us, explaining why most drivers and tour guides here were female. Quang Binh tries to send 2,400 – 2,700 people ever year to work abroad.
As we took the first step on the wooden walkway inside the cave, the drop in temperature was immediate. The walkway for the general public is one kilometer long, but explorers can take a tour with experts to explore the next seven kilometers.
The exhilaration begins
It was in the Dark Cave – Chay River tourism area that the excitement and exhilaration began.
The water sports on Chay River are fun and refreshing. Whether it was just swimming and floating around, kayaking of using the zipline, this is where you actually chuck your stress away. Our threesome sailed around in circles in kayak before a guard did us a favor and pulled his back, but it was not an off-putting experience.
The Chay river in Quang Binh province. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Xinh
The zipline was the thrill for us on this trip. The feeling of flying in the air across the river to get to the Dark Cave is not something you get to do on a normal holiday.
Inside the dark cave, full of sharp rocks and slipper steps, there was both the fear and thrill that danger can provide when there is safety at hand, in this instance, we had a guide who knew the place and her job very well. Without her, there would be zero thrill and 100 percent fear – fear that one small mistake can cost us our lives.
We swayed and wriggled till we reached the mineral mud bath. “Come inside, the mud is great for your skin”, said Tuyen, our tour guide. An underground stream carries minerals from limestone blocks in a nearby valley, piling the mineral mud near the mouth of the Dark cave. A mud bath would make your skin glow, our guide insisted.
On the way back, one tourist’s light went off. Tuyen handed him her light and guided us through the dark.
“Don’t worry, this is like my house. I know everything about it”, she said as she agilely climbed over a limestone rock, knowing exactly where to put her feet.
“It is all safe, when you get to know it”.
                                                                                               Story by Bao Ngoc
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newssplashy · 7 years ago
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Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.
In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pullled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.
Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical loupe. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family-run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.
“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.”
Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them. Each publication hired him twice, with long breaks between tours of duty.
He became the subject of a documentary called “City of Gold,” a role model imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of “99 Essential LA Restaurants” was declaimed over the beat of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” and a verb. When actor Mindy Kaling asked Twitter for a pizza recommendation, she added: “Don’t Jonathan Gold me and tell me to go to the San Gabriel Valley.”
He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.
If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.
“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”
He made a subspecialty of one street in particular. Reichl, who hired him at the Times and Gourmet, recalls his telling her in the 1980s that he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was not just tacos. Eventually he wrote about his fascination with the street in a 1998 article that began, “For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.”
In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”
Jonathan Gold was born July 28, 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he was raised. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. Irwin Gold, his father, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. Jonathan later recalled eating Rice-A-Roni every Tuesday night and spending much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of new wave, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.
With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”
While he was in college, Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, where he was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. For a time in the 1980s, he was the newspaper’s music editor, and by the 1990s he was better known as a music journalist than a food writer, contributing long articles to Spin, Details and other magazines. While reporting a Rolling Stone article about the emergence of gangsta rap, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg gave him a nickname: Nervous Cuz.
The music scene changes at a pace that can wear out a middle-aged writer, but food writers tend to improve as they get more meals under their belt. In 1986, Gold had started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants who were often the only customers until he walked in.
In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.
“In New York, because it is so condensed, you’re very aware of who’s around,” he once said, “whereas in Los Angeles, if you open a Korean restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll only serve to Koreans. That sort of isolation is not necessarily good for politics or civil life, but it is really good for food.”
Far from a stunt eater, he nevertheless understood that a writer trying to persuade unseen strangers to read about a restaurant one or two counties away cannot afford to dismiss the persuasive power of chopped goats’ brains, pigs’ blood soup or an octopus leg separated from the rest of a living octopus so recently that it twirls itself around the nearest pair of chopsticks.
These delicacies and others were described in language that was anachronistic in its rolling, deliberate gait but exquisitely contemporary in its allusions. He could pack infinitesimal shadings of nuance into a rhetorical question.
The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts that, taken together, nobody but Gold had ever visited and consumed.
In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”
His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”
Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than 6 feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being take by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later when Gold’s review was published.
Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed LA Weekly to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.
Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Chang.
In his first term at LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again.
She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.
“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
PETE WELLS © 2018 The New York Times
via NigeriaNews | Latest Nigerian News,Ghana News,News,Entertainment,World News,sports,Naij In a Splash
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nyflowerguy · 7 years ago
Text
Sharing a few things that have made me into who I am today…
Today, it’s my birthday. So I thought I’d share with you a few things that have made me into who I am, one for each year that I’ve been on Planet Earth…
I was born in a 200 year old cottage in rural Devon, on a small farm in a hamlet called Worston, two miles from the nearest village of Yealmpton.
My name is spelt R-o-n-a (not Rhona, Rhonda, Rowna or Rowena!)
On our farm, we had a chick called Cucumber, a sheep called Debbie, a pig called Piggy and cows called Susan and Jane.
My dad was born in Plymstock, was a self-employed butcher and worked from a big shed on our farm.
My mum was born in Glasgow and was the youngest of eleven children. She was a midwifery sister. And her nickname for me when I was growing up was Jemima Pumpernickel.
My middle name is Dunbar, the maiden name of my grandmother on my mother’s side.
I was born with only one kidney, so have been advised not to ski or play rugby!
I have two younger brothers.
When I was a child, my grandmother on my father’s side would often take me on a little tour around her garden and tell me about the flowers, or fow-fows as I called them. (She also used to make us delicious grated milk chocolate sandwiches!)
I’m related to a famous golfer, although I don’t play myself.
At primary school, I played the recorder, clarinet and tenor horn.
When I was growing up, I used to try and make ‘perfume’ with rose petals from our garden, without much success, I hasten to add.
I represented my school as a shot putter in the Devon County Games! (I was very tall for my age and a little bit well-built, ahem.)
At secondary school, I was a bus prefect and Managing Director of our Young Enterprise Scheme.
I have naturally curly hair, which can be a little challenging to look after sometimes. I’m currently fond of Bumble & Bumble’s Don’t Blow It and Boucleme products.
I went to the 1985 Live Aid concert. The highlight was seeing Queen, with the whole of Wembley Stadium clapping along to Radio Ga Ga.
I went to Buckinghamshire New University and studied a degree in European Business Studies, specialising in Marketing and German.
I lived in Osnabruck, Germany for a year as part of my degree course and became very partial to the Sunday afternoon tradition of ‘Kaffee and Kuchen’. I especially loved apple streusel cake.
During university holidays, I worked as a receptionist at Wrigleys, in the café and restaurant at The National Shire Horse Centre and behind the bar plus waitressing in the Rose & Crown in Yealmpton. (The pub regulars found it very amusing to play My Sharona on the jukebox.)
After university, I took a year off and worked as a travel rep for Thomson Holidays in Majorca, where there was a flash flood. I was rescued by the hotel electrician and I’m very lucky to have survived! I also worked in Fuerteventura.
Growing up, my girl crush was singer Sheena Easton. I even used to ask my mum to cut my hair like hers.
I’ve worked in Customer Services & Training Departments at MAID Systems, Brittany Ferries, The Financial Times and Lexis Nexis Butterworths Tolley. Plus I’ve worked as a florist at The White Orchid, Esher and Paula Pryke Flowers, London.
I studied for a National Certificate in Floristry at Southwark College, London.
On honeymoon in Grenada, I fell ill and it took two years, seven doctors, lots of tests and an MRI before I was finally diagnosed with BPPV and Labyrinthitis. The symptoms are intense dizziness and it occasionally comes back, unfortunately.
I’m one of life’s worriers. So, to help, I try and mediate for 15 minutes a day and I also go to a weekly class. It’s helped massively.
I have a very unusual anatomy, which means that I’ve not been able to have children. It’s been very hard to come to terms with…and I still struggle with it sometimes.
I was introduced to my husband Matt by a work colleague also called Matt at The Financial Times in 1999.
Matt and I have been married for 15 years and live in an Edwardian house in Surrey.
I set up Flowerona in December 2010 and work from home.
I’m passionate about flowers and my favourites are peonies and ranunculus.
I’m a National Trust member, and I love going for walks by the sea and in the countryside.
I’m very squeamish.
My favourite perfume is Angel by Thierry Mugler.
One of the rules I try to live my life by is ‘treat others as you would be treated’ and I always tend to put other people first.
I go to the local gym between 3-5 times a week to do Zumba, Pilates, Yoga and Barre Concept classes.
I have the patience of a saint.
I’m a chocoholic and eat Green & Black’s Butterscotch most days. My failsafe chocolate recipes are Jamie’s ‘Fifteen’ Chocolate Brownies and Delia’s Chocolate Melting Puddings.
Most days I eat porridge with chopped bananas and walnuts plus maple syrup for breakfast, even in the summer.
I’m a very lightweight drinker but my favourite tipples are Sauvignon Blanc and Amaretto.
My favourite colour is purple.
I’m very driven…too much sometimes.
I’m passionate about photography and love nothing better than capturing images with my Canon 5D Mark III.
I love vegetables, especially sweet potatoes, and could very easily become a vegetarian.
Celebrities I’ve met include Darcy Bussell, Gethin Jones, Alan Titchmarsh, Sarah Raven and Kirstie Allsopp.
I’m very risk averse, sensitive and a perfectionist.
I’m a great believer in karma, ‘what goes around comes around’.
My favourite fruits are bananas and raspberries.
Some of the places I’ve travelled to are France (Paris, St Tropez, Lille, Bordeaux, Ile de Re, Nice, St-Jean-de-Luz, St Malo, Nice, Caen, Perros-Guirec, Treguier, Dinard, Courchevel, Chamonix), Italy (Venice, Cermignano, Pescara), Holland (Amsterdam, The Hague), Germany (Heidelberg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt), Spain (San Sebastian, Granada, Barcelona, Santander, Biarritz, Majorca, Minorca, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote), Cyprus (Paphos), Denmark (Copenhagen), Switzerland (Verbier, Geneva), Czech Republic (Prague), Turkey (Marmaris, Oludeniz), Greece (Poros, Hydra, Spetses, Athens), Egypt (Hurghada), United States (New York), Caribbean (Grenada, Grenadines).
I’m currently trying to set boundaries, so that I don’t work every waking moment! And to chill in the evening I’ve become very fond of watching Netflix and Amazon Prime – Big Little Lies, Downton Abbey, The Crown, The Good Wife.
I always think the best of people and give them the benefit of the doubt. So much so that my husband often teases me and says: ‘Everybody’s lovely in Rona-land.’
I’d love to be a TV presenter, showcasing flowers, florists and floristry.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s little insight into what makes me tick and perhaps some of the things you can relate to, too…
from Flowerona http://ift.tt/2yaNW7P via IFTTT
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newssplashy · 7 years ago
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Entertainment: Jonathan Gold, food critic who celebrated la's Cornucopia, dies at 57
Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.
In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pullled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.
Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical loupe. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family-run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.
“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.”
Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them. Each publication hired him twice, with long breaks between tours of duty.
He became the subject of a documentary called “City of Gold,” a role model imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of “99 Essential LA Restaurants” was declaimed over the beat of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” and a verb. When actor Mindy Kaling asked Twitter for a pizza recommendation, she added: “Don’t Jonathan Gold me and tell me to go to the San Gabriel Valley.”
He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.
If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.
“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”
He made a subspecialty of one street in particular. Reichl, who hired him at the Times and Gourmet, recalls his telling her in the 1980s that he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was not just tacos. Eventually he wrote about his fascination with the street in a 1998 article that began, “For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.”
In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”
Jonathan Gold was born July 28, 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he was raised. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. Irwin Gold, his father, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. Jonathan later recalled eating Rice-A-Roni every Tuesday night and spending much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of new wave, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.
With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”
While he was in college, Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, where he was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. For a time in the 1980s, he was the newspaper’s music editor, and by the 1990s he was better known as a music journalist than a food writer, contributing long articles to Spin, Details and other magazines. While reporting a Rolling Stone article about the emergence of gangsta rap, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg gave him a nickname: Nervous Cuz.
The music scene changes at a pace that can wear out a middle-aged writer, but food writers tend to improve as they get more meals under their belt. In 1986, Gold had started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants who were often the only customers until he walked in.
In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.
“In New York, because it is so condensed, you’re very aware of who’s around,” he once said, “whereas in Los Angeles, if you open a Korean restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll only serve to Koreans. That sort of isolation is not necessarily good for politics or civil life, but it is really good for food.”
Far from a stunt eater, he nevertheless understood that a writer trying to persuade unseen strangers to read about a restaurant one or two counties away cannot afford to dismiss the persuasive power of chopped goats’ brains, pigs’ blood soup or an octopus leg separated from the rest of a living octopus so recently that it twirls itself around the nearest pair of chopsticks.
These delicacies and others were described in language that was anachronistic in its rolling, deliberate gait but exquisitely contemporary in its allusions. He could pack infinitesimal shadings of nuance into a rhetorical question.
The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts that, taken together, nobody but Gold had ever visited and consumed.
In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”
His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”
Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than 6 feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being take by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later when Gold’s review was published.
Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed LA Weekly to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.
Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Chang.
In his first term at LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again.
She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.
“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
PETE WELLS © 2018 The New York Times
source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/entertainment-jonathan-gold-food-critic_22.html
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newssplashy · 7 years ago
Link
Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.
In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pullled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.
Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical loupe. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family-run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.
“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.”
Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them. Each publication hired him twice, with long breaks between tours of duty.
He became the subject of a documentary called “City of Gold,” a role model imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of “99 Essential LA Restaurants” was declaimed over the beat of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” and a verb. When actor Mindy Kaling asked Twitter for a pizza recommendation, she added: “Don’t Jonathan Gold me and tell me to go to the San Gabriel Valley.”
He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.
If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.
“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”
He made a subspecialty of one street in particular. Reichl, who hired him at the Times and Gourmet, recalls his telling her in the 1980s that he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was not just tacos. Eventually he wrote about his fascination with the street in a 1998 article that began, “For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.”
In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”
Jonathan Gold was born July 28, 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he was raised. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. Irwin Gold, his father, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. Jonathan later recalled eating Rice-A-Roni every Tuesday night and spending much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of new wave, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.
With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”
While he was in college, Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, where he was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. For a time in the 1980s, he was the newspaper’s music editor, and by the 1990s he was better known as a music journalist than a food writer, contributing long articles to Spin, Details and other magazines. While reporting a Rolling Stone article about the emergence of gangsta rap, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg gave him a nickname: Nervous Cuz.
The music scene changes at a pace that can wear out a middle-aged writer, but food writers tend to improve as they get more meals under their belt. In 1986, Gold had started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants who were often the only customers until he walked in.
In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.
“In New York, because it is so condensed, you’re very aware of who’s around,” he once said, “whereas in Los Angeles, if you open a Korean restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll only serve to Koreans. That sort of isolation is not necessarily good for politics or civil life, but it is really good for food.”
Far from a stunt eater, he nevertheless understood that a writer trying to persuade unseen strangers to read about a restaurant one or two counties away cannot afford to dismiss the persuasive power of chopped goats’ brains, pigs’ blood soup or an octopus leg separated from the rest of a living octopus so recently that it twirls itself around the nearest pair of chopsticks.
These delicacies and others were described in language that was anachronistic in its rolling, deliberate gait but exquisitely contemporary in its allusions. He could pack infinitesimal shadings of nuance into a rhetorical question.
The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts that, taken together, nobody but Gold had ever visited and consumed.
In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”
His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”
Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than 6 feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being take by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later when Gold’s review was published.
Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed LA Weekly to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.
Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Chang.
In his first term at LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again.
She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.
“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
PETE WELLS © 2018 The New York Times
via NigeriaNews | Latest Nigerian News,Ghana News,News,Entertainment,World News,sports,Naij In a Splash
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newssplashy · 7 years ago
Text
Entertainment: Jonathan Gold, food critic who celebrated la's Cornucopia, dies at 57
Jonathan Gold, the restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Margy Rochlin, a close friend.
In more than a thousand reviews published since the 1980s, Gold chronicled his city’s pupuserias, bistros, diners, nomadic taco trucks, soot-caked outdoor rib and brisket smokers, sweaty indoor xiao long bao steamers, postmodern pizzerias, vintage delicatessens, strictly omakase sushi-yas, Roman gelaterias, Korean porridge parlors, Lanzhou hand-pullled noodle vendors, Iranian tongue-sandwich shops, vegan hot dog griddles, cloistered French-leaning hyper-seasonal tasting counters and wood-paneled Hollywood grills with chicken potpie and martinis on every other table.
Unlike some critics, Gold never saw expensive, rarefied restaurants as the peak of the terrain he surveyed, although he reviewed his share of them. Shiki Beverly Hills, Noma and Alinea all took turns under his critical loupe. He was in his element, though, when he championed small, family-run establishments where publicists and wine lists were unheard-of and English was often a second language, if it was spoken at all.
“Before Tony Bourdain, before reality TV and ‘Parts Unknown’ and people really being into ethnic food in a serious way, it was Jonathan who got it, completely,” writer and editor Ruth Reichl said. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community. He was really writing about the people more than the food.”
Gold wrote about restaurants for Gourmet, California and Los Angeles magazines, but the bulk of his reviews appeared in two newspapers: LA Weekly, where in 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and the Los Angeles Times, where he had been the chief critic since 2012, treating the restaurants of famous and obscure chefs as if he saw no distinction between them. Each publication hired him twice, with long breaks between tours of duty.
He became the subject of a documentary called “City of Gold,” a role model imitated painstakingly and largely in vain by a generation of food writers, a living street atlas of Southern California, the inspiration for a rap tribute in which his list of “99 Essential LA Restaurants” was declaimed over the beat of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” and a verb. When actor Mindy Kaling asked Twitter for a pizza recommendation, she added: “Don’t Jonathan Gold me and tell me to go to the San Gabriel Valley.”
He may not have eaten everything in Los Angeles, but nobody came closer. He rarely went to the subject of one of his reviews without stopping to try four or five other places along the way. He once estimated that in the hunt for interesting new things to eat and write about, he put 20,000 miles on his green Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck each year. While driving, he liked listening to opera.
If a new group of immigrants turned up in Los Angeles County, chances were good he had already studied the benchmark dishes of their cuisine in one or more of the 3,000 to 5,000 cookbooks he owned. If a restaurant opened, he probably knew the names and specialties of the last five restaurants at that address. In a 2006 review of a Beverly Hills steakhouse, he recalled going to the same location to eat patty melts with his mother and to drink warm beer that a sympathetic waitress poured into teacups after hours when he was a young punk rocker, all in the first paragraph.
“LA always seemed better when he wrote about it,” film critic John Powers, a friend of Gold’s, said. “You just thought, There’s so much stuff here.”
He made a subspecialty of one street in particular. Reichl, who hired him at the Times and Gourmet, recalls his telling her in the 1980s that he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was not just tacos. Eventually he wrote about his fascination with the street in a 1998 article that began, “For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school.”
In 2016, Ecco Press bought his proposal for a memoir, which Gold called “a culinary coming of age book, I guess.” It was to be called “Breakfast on Pico.”
Jonathan Gold was born July 28, 1960, in South Los Angeles, where he was raised. His mother, Judith, was a school librarian who had been a magician’s assistant. Irwin Gold, his father, was a probation officer assigned to supervise Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, among other offenders. Jonathan later recalled eating Rice-A-Roni every Tuesday night and spending much of his childhood in his room, playing the cello. When he was old enough to fall under the influence of new wave, he plugged in his instrument and sawed away at it in the short-lived local band Overman.
With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer. His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”
While he was in college, Gold walked into the office of LA Weekly, an alternative paper, where he was soon reading proofs and pitching big, doomed ideas about the zeitgeist. For a time in the 1980s, he was the newspaper’s music editor, and by the 1990s he was better known as a music journalist than a food writer, contributing long articles to Spin, Details and other magazines. While reporting a Rolling Stone article about the emergence of gangsta rap, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg gave him a nickname: Nervous Cuz.
The music scene changes at a pace that can wear out a middle-aged writer, but food writers tend to improve as they get more meals under their belt. In 1986, Gold had started a column for LA Weekly about the kinds of places where he liked to eat. It was called Counter Intelligence. Week by week, year by year, he built a reputation for finding restaurants that were virtually unknown outside the neighborhoods of immigrants who were often the only customers until he walked in.
In his peregrinations, he came to appreciate how Los Angeles’s far-flung neighborhoods allowed small, distinct cultures to flourish without bumping into each other.
“In New York, because it is so condensed, you’re very aware of who’s around,” he once said, “whereas in Los Angeles, if you open a Korean restaurant, there’s a good chance you’ll only serve to Koreans. That sort of isolation is not necessarily good for politics or civil life, but it is really good for food.”
Far from a stunt eater, he nevertheless understood that a writer trying to persuade unseen strangers to read about a restaurant one or two counties away cannot afford to dismiss the persuasive power of chopped goats’ brains, pigs’ blood soup or an octopus leg separated from the rest of a living octopus so recently that it twirls itself around the nearest pair of chopsticks.
These delicacies and others were described in language that was anachronistic in its rolling, deliberate gait but exquisitely contemporary in its allusions. He could pack infinitesimal shadings of nuance into a rhetorical question.
The hallmark of his style, though, was the second-person voice. He used it prodigiously. Taken literally, he seemed to be saying that you, personally, had visited a great number of restaurants and consumed a wide variety of animal parts that, taken together, nobody but Gold had ever visited and consumed.
In “City of Gold,” Sue Horton, an editor at Reuters, says of his use of the second person, “He’s forming a bond with the reader: You and I are people who eat deer penis.”
His prose was apparently as agonizing to produce as it was pleasurable to read. For a time he saw a therapist for writer’s block until it was mutually agreed that somebody as prolific as Gold could not be described as blocked. Editors were driven to despair by his habit of taking deadlines seriously only once they were safely in the past. Powers, who edited him at LA Weekly, called him “the Usain Bolt of being slow.”
Like many restaurant critics, he tried to keep his image out of circulation for years. Anybody who had seen him was unlikely to forget him, though. He was more than 6 feet tall, with wispy ripples of shoulder-length strawberry blond hair that in recent years had tended to avoid the top of his scalp. His chin was capacious. When he turned up at a Peruvian stall in a food court a few years ago, the chef, Ricardo Zarate, wondered why so many pictures were being take by a man who “looked like George Washington.” He figured it out a few weeks later when Gold’s review was published.
Informally, the incognito phase ended when a photograph of Gold celebrating his Pulitzer win in a pink, Champagne-basted shirt got around. Officially, it was finished when he allowed LA Weekly to publish his photograph shortly before the release of “City of Gold” in 2015.
Between his amiability and his longevity on the job, he accumulated friends in the restaurant business. Some of his disclosures could make interesting reading. When he reviewed David Chang’s new restaurant in Los Angeles, Majordomo, his thoughts on the cooking took up only slightly more space than his partial history of his dealings with Chang.
In his first term at LA Weekly he met Laurie Ochoa, an intern and now an editor, whom he married in 1990. They went to restaurants together and contrived to work together, moving in tandem from one publication to another: the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet, LA Weekly again, the Times again.
She survives him, along with their children, Isabel and Leon, and Gold’s brother, Mark, the associate director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Many claims have been made for Gold’s criticism, but he saw his work in modest terms. He wanted to make Los Angeles smaller.
“I’m not a cultural anthropologist,” he once said. “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
PETE WELLS © 2018 The New York Times
source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/entertainment-jonathan-gold-food-critic.html
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