Category Archives: de cibo

The sushi in California is just better…

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I’m sorry but the sushi in California (and the west coast in general) is just better than everywhere else in the U.S.

New York has its Masa (ho hum) and Austin has its Uchi (yes, sushi in Texas), but there’s just nothing and nowhere that comes close to the wide range of styles and price points and ubiquity of Southern California sushi and Japanese cuisine.

Popped into K-ZO Japanese and French restaurant in Culver City for quick working lunch with a friend and colleague today and man, that shit rocks… The live sweet shrimp — tails served raw and heads dredged in flour and deep-fried (lower left hand corner) — were friggin’ amazing…

Come taste with me tonight and tomorrow at Sotto in LA…

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I’ll be “working the floor,” as we say in the biz, pouring and talking about wine tonight and tomorrow at Sotto in Los Angeles…

Please come by and say hello and I’ll pour you something great!

Why housemade salsa makes all the difference…

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Flew in to San Diego yesterday from Texas to begin shipping and delivering wine for Do Bianchi Wine Selections and just had to stop at JV’s Mexican, just a few blocks from my warehouse, for lunch. Like all great Mexican joints, JV’s — which has been around since I was a kid — makes all of its salsas and condiments in-house.

The salsa bar = AWESOME.

They’re not kidding about the “reasonable” prices. Love this place…

Three rolled tacos — flautas — stuffed with chicken and topped with creamy guacamole and shredded cheese is just $2.25 (only 25 cents more than when I was 18 years old!). Cannot have the flautas without the horchata.

I’ve had some of the best Mexican food of my life since I moved to Texas, but, man, California will also be my number one. Love this place…

Austin was buzzing last night… with food and wine… Chapeau bas Diane!

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Above: The social media was orgiastic last night at Diane Dixon’s excellent Somms Under Fire event at the W Hotel in downtown Austin. That’s top Austin food blooger Miso Hungry (center) with her better half and photographer @HopSafari.

Not only is Diane Dixon one of sweetest and most generous souls I’ve met in the nearly three years I’ve lived in Texas, she is also the first lady of Texas food and wine. Her events — like the Somms Under Fire dinner and competition, held last night at the swank W Hotel in downtown Austin — bring together the best and the brightest of the Texas food and wine scene. They offer young food and wine professionals the chance to interact with top names in the field and they give the public an opportunity to meet food and wine celebrities and get a peek behind the scenes.

Above: Top Austin sommelier June Rodil took home yet another title last night. That’s her with presenter and local wine celebrity in his own right, Devon Broglie.

When I left New York City back in 2007 and then abandoned my beloved California in 2008 to come to Texas, many of my well-meaning friends expressed their concern: what will you drink?

Well, I’m here to tell you that we get some good vino out here in Texas, too!

My highlight was this 1996 Mongeard-Mugneret Grand Échezeaux that somehow made it to my table. Still very tight but what a thrill to drink a glass of that wine…

I was also geeked to see and taste the 08 Rosso di Montalcino by Il Poggione, which showed great last night… always a great value for real Sangiovese…

There were roughly 10 bottles of wine — samples from the competition — on each table of eight persons and even the VIP tickets for the four-course dinner were under $60! A pretty good value IMHO for the experience…

Chapeau bas, Diane, for another great event and for another chapter in your noble quest to inform the next generation of food and wine lovers in Texas! I enjoyed myself thoroughly…

And when I woke this morning to read that Esquire has called my friend and client Tony Vallone (Houston) one the top Italian restaurateurs in the U.S., I couldn’t help but think to myself, we’ve got a pretty good thing going down here in Texas, don’t we?

A living museum of Tex-Mex at Robb Walsh’s El Real, Houston

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Googling around the internets this morning, reflecting on a fascinating dinner and conversation last night with legendary Texas food writer Robb Walsh and his protégé Katharine Shilcutt (both magister and alumna have been nominated for this year’s James Beard food writing awards, btw), I found the above and wonderful photograph Tula Borunda Guttierez in an archived copy of Texas Monthly, January 1986.

Robb wisely insisted that I have the Enchiladas Borunda last night at his newly opened, living and breathing, museum of “vintage” Tex-Mex cuisine and restaurant, El Real in Houston: stacked as opposed to rolled enchiladas, a signature dish of the Old Cafe Borunda in Marfa, Texas, a restaurant that he calls the historic epicenter of Tex-Mex cuisine.

I also found this utterly riveting high school essay, dated 1965 and composed in Marfa, by Lupe Lujan, “Love, Laughter, and Enchiladas: A History of The Old Borunda Cafe and the Women Who Made it Famous.” I devoured the entire essay this morning over my coffee (don’t miss the episode where the café is visited by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor!).

El Real is the most-talked-about restaurant in Houston right now. It is, after all, the brainchild of Houston restaurateur aristocracy (from the dudes at Reef et alia) and el rey of tejano food writing, Robb, who literally wrote the book on Tex-Mex cuisine.

I’ll leave the punditry to the pundits and will merely inform you that the stacked Enchiladas Borunda (above, stuffed with braised pork and topped with fried egg) were delicious (“I’m glad to see we made you sweat,” said Robb.). They were preceded by the sine qua non of Tex-Mex cuisine, Queso with Picadillo (made rigorously with
Velveeta, noted Robb), and an excellent heaping ladleful of Posoles (below).

Be sure not to miss the Tex-Mex museum in the gallery above the dining room floor and don’t hesitate to grill Robb with questions about Tex-Mex cuisine and its place in the culinary canon of Americana (as I did). He’s there every night and he loves to talk about this super fun project.

It was remarkable to watch and hear the interaction between Robb and his hand-picked successor Katharine, now the food critic at the Houston Press, the city’s weekly alternative rag. She worked in corporate America until Robb discovered her awesome blog, She Eats. Now they’re both up for James Beard awards!

Robb talked about his background in advertising and how his early gigs in food writing didn’t pay. As we got up from the table, he looked around the packed dining room and waxed, “Isn’t it incredible? I made money while I was having dinner!”

Quo vadis romae? An app for the Rome-bound pilgrim.

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Above: Rome is the most beautiful city in the world, imho, and it’s the greatest place in the world to drink Italian wine. I snapped this shot of the Colosseum when I was there last September.

Quo vadis romae? (Where are you going, Rome-bound pilgrim?)

It seems that nearly every week I receive a message from a romeo or romea — a Rome-bound pilgrim (pronounced roh-MEH-oh, btw), the original meaning of the proper name that Shakespeare’s play made so famous in the English language.

Yesterday, I received two (no kidding)! In both emails, the romeos asked me where to eat and drink in the Eternal City.

Above: Katie Parla is my go-to when I go to Rome. Here’s the post about our amazing dinner at Pizzeria La Fucina last year.

As much I know and love Rome (I spent six months studying the Petrarchan manuscripts at the Vatican library when I was a Fulbright fellow) and as much I know and love the wine and restaurant scene there (it is, imho, the greatest city of Italian wine), ubi major, minor cessat: my favorite expert on all things Roman, the inimitable (and aptly named) Katie Parla has released a Rome guide app for smartphones.

I highly recommend her blog and her app. She is my number-one resource for what’s cool and cutting edge in the Roman food and wine scene.

Above: Rome always takes my breath away. I snapped the above photo in September.

On this Good Friday, it seemed appropriate to post about Rome and Katie’s blog.

My best advice about visiting Rome? When a Roman cab driver takes you the long way so that he can charge you a little bit extra, he’s not ripping you off: he’s showing you around the most beautiful city on earth.

Parzen Family Passover

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Seder plate.

Wow, what a trip to celebrate the Passover and read the story of the Exodus and think about all the folks who are fighting for their freedom in the Middle East???!!!

Gefilte fish from Ziggy’s in Houston.

Tracie P and I had eight persons at our dining room table for a seder, which I led using this haggadah posted for all to use by the Jewish Federations of North America.

I roasted a leg of lamb for the main course.

Mama Judy taught me how to make her matzoh balls and her charoset. And I made my own horseradish sauce to serve with the gefilte fish and the lamb.

We drank three orphaned bottles from the Hippie Six-Pack — a gently sparkling Cortese and a still Barbera by Valli Unite and Tony Coturri’s Sandocino.

The Barbera by Valli Unite is one of the best wines I’ve tasted in 2011 and it is simply SINGING right now. Cannot drink enough of it. All of the wines were made using native, ambient yeasts… definitely not kosher for Passover (and we obviously don’t keep a kosher kitchen) but it was interesting to contemplate the role of yeast in the religion of Natural wine and Passover. If humankind’s use of yeast is the rational distortion of nature (as Lévi-Strauss interpreted it), Passover is the festival that removes yeast from our lives, instructing us to banish yeast from our homes. A rational distortion of a rational distortion? Of course, the Passover seder could not be complete or completed without wine. And so yeast is inevitably and invariably part of the ritual. (The best source for kosher for Passover wines, btw imho, is our favorite wine writer and one of our favorite people in the world, Alice Feiring.)

Three generations sat at our dining room table for our first Passover seder. As I led the seder and read the words, “It is because of what G-d did for me when I came out of Egypt,” I thought about the generation of my family who fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, before the Russian revolution, to make a better life for their children in the U.S. For all the headaches and troubles we deal with on a day-to-day basis, we sure have a good life and we sure are lucky to have each other.

Hag sameach, ya’ll!

Fernet Branca shakerato, the only way I drink it

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Above: Fernet Branca shakerato at Tony’s in Houston.

Mama Judy flew into Houston yesterday and we’ll be celebrating the Passover tomorrow evening in Austin. And last night, the Branch, Levy, Kelly, and Parzen families gathered at Tony’s for una cena da leoni — an epic meal.

And after such a sumptuous and rich meal (see below), I must have a Fernet Branca — shakerato (chilled, shakered, and strained), the only way I drink it.

My relationship with the storied and celebrated digestivo stretches back to my earliest days as a copywriter in the early aughts back in NYC. My first gig was as editor of the Fernet Branca monthly newsletter.

At the time (before the tragedy of September 11, 2001), Fernet Branca had just reopened its bottling facility in TriBeCa. It was an amazing space: until the 1980s, when the US FDA blocked the import of Fernet Branca because it was still being sold as a drug (!), it was so popular in this country that the company continued to operate its 1930s-era bottling facility in lower Manhattan. When the US government blocked its sale, Fernet Branca hastily abandoned and boarded up the place, leaving the entire operation in place. In the late 90s, they decided to reopen it as the headquarters for a relaunch of the brand (which, by that time, was coming into the country legally, classified and regulated as a spirit).

The most amazing part of the facility was the counterfeit detection laboratory. The brand was so popular — before, during, and after Prohibition, when it was marketed as a “tonic” and regulated as a drug — that the company devoted significant resources to its anti-counterfeit operation. The laboratory — like a set from Young Frankenstein — was a museum of Fernet Branca imitators and pirates. Cobwebs and a patina of nearly two decades of dust. An amazing sight…

During my tenure as the editor of the Fernet Branca newsletter (which ended when the tragedy of 2001 reshaped the landscape of that neighborhood), I traveled twice to the Fernet Branca distillery in Milan and it was fascinating experience to learn the secrets and study the history of this brandy infused with mushrooms and herbs — the restaurant and bartending professional’s digestif of choice in this country (just ask any bartender).

Highlights from dinner…

Tony’s famous “Greenberg” salad. (I must confess that besides writing a hit song, I also aspire to having a salad named after me.)

Gnocchi “Primavera” with fiddlehead greens and Washington state ramps. Delicious…

Whole, salt-encrusted Gulf of Mexico red snapper, filleted tableside…

And then dressed in a reduction of guineafowl jus and Barolo… This dish wowed our table of ten…

Tracie P was truly aglow last night… more beautiful than ever… Mrs. and Rev. B drove in from Orange just to see everyone and break bread together (photo by cousin Dana).

Cousin Marty is now more than halfway through his treatment (very tough, as you can imagine, but he’s soldiering through it). He rallied to be with us last night. It just wouldn’t be a dinner at Tony’s without Marty: “If I’m going out to eat,” he exclaimed the day before with the panache that I love him for, “it’s going to be at Tony’s!”

A wonderful, wonderful, unforgettable night… a table of ten, celebrating the lives of our families, remembering how lucky we are to be here and to be together, and dreaming of the future… at the table of a great friend…

Thoughts, wishes, and prayers for pizzaiolo Mark Iacono

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Life was very different for me when I first discovered and wrote about pizzaiolo Mark Iacono and his amazing pizzeria Lucali in Brooklyn back in January 2008.

Today, as The New York Times reports, Mark is recovering after being stabbed not far from his restaurant in Carroll Gardens.

He is in our thoughts and our prayers…

Avocado fundido

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Finally made it in for lunch at the much-talked-about Second (and Congress) Bar and Kitchen here in the River City (that’s Austin for all yall who’ve never been here).

That’s the “Avocado Fundido,” above, layered and baked cheese, mashed avocado, and crumbled chorizo (on the bottom) served with fried dough. Fan-friggin-delicious, folks.

Hoping that it might entice BrooklynGuy to come out and visit, I thought I’d post this snap of smoked sausage at one of my fav BBQ joints on highway 290 to Houston, Southside Market in Elgin. The sausage is always juicy and tender there and the sides fresh… Love that place…

Happy Saturday yall!