¡Buenos días, señoras y caballeros, hermanos y hermanas! ¡La Guanaquita Restaurante es muy bueno!
Why, yes, I am speaking a little Spanish today, signing on from a sweet little new Central American eatery in the South End. Continue reading Hablamos y comemos at La Guanaquita Restaurante
Here’s the deal: I really, really want to go to Cuba, and I’d like to get over there before it turns back into Vegas South, which – so I’m told – is what it was more than a half-century ago, when my grandparents used to head over there just for fun.
Continue reading Until we can get to Cuba, Yoli’s will do
I can’t resist mentioning this briefly, since my mini-report on the HotBytes forum and Facebook on New Year’s Day blew up with “Likes” and comments, hinting that there’s public interest in this bizarre development: White Castle, at least for a while, now offers a veggie burger, of all things. They’re only 99 cents each, cheap, but like their meatful siblings, it takes a few to satisfy an appetite.
Continue reading Signs of the apocalypse: The White Castle veggie slider
Hey! Vietnam Kitchen’s got duck! Succulent, delicious duck, fatty and rich! And they’ve got “mock duck,” too: an alternative invented by vegetarian Buddhist monks! Either way, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be … well, you know.
Naturally my mind spun a Pythonesque duck-taunting fight.
Continue reading Duck taunters all win at Vietnam Kitchen
The simple black logo that adorns Louisville’s popular Grind Burger truck and its new sibling, Grind Burger Kitchen, speaks volumes about owners Liz and Jesse Huot’s brisk journey from corporate life to the uncertain joys of running a popular food truck.
Well … actually, Grind is not exactly a food truck. It’s a concession trailer towed by a pickup truck. And that, like the black, gear-like logo, is part of their story.
Continue reading The daily Grind pays off for Liz and Jesse Huot
When you’re buying a car, a suit, a pair of shoes, a watch, or even a hamburger, quality makes a difference. Leather seats or plastic in your family limo? All-weather wool from Armani or shiny polyester from T.J.Maxx? Mephisto loafers, or sneakers from Payless? Tag Heuer or a fake Rolex?
Oh, hell, this is too complicated. Let’s go get a burger.
?Or not.
Continue reading Quality counts at Grind Burger Kitchen
Menudo, the fabulously strong flavored and fiery Mexican stew made from pork chitlins (“chitterlings,” to the prissy, or, if you insist on a definition in English, pork intestines) is one of the world’s most trusted hangover cures.
This may relate to the truth that, no matter how bad you feel, if you can hold down a stenchy ration of menudo, you can probably hold down just about anything.
Continue reading Feeling offal? Check out your local taqueria
Life as a hunter-gatherer was hard, no question about that. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, this life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
But at least paleolithic humans didn’t have to make many decisions at supper time. Knock over an animal, whack off a chunk and chow down. Cooking it was optional, once people learned to tame fire. It was only when humans settled down in agricultural societies about 10,000 years ago that culinary life got complicated. Continue reading Celebrate the Noble Noodle at Thai Noodles
Hay!! Chi Wa Waa!? Chapinlandia? What the heck is going on here? Did someone just yell, “Alex, I’ll take ‘Restaurants with Unusual Names’ for $500”? Nah.
Continue reading Hay!! Chi Wa Waa! Where in the heck is Chapinlandia?
Okay, let’s run the numbers here. Vietnam Kitchen has been open for about 20.5 years, six days a week. That’s roughly 6,500 days of serving the public since Alex and Kim Lam brought this lovable institution to town in 1993.
Thinking out loud, that means that if every day they sell five orders of “K8,” the menu shorthand for H? ti?u Saté, a delectable rice-noodle dish that’s surely one of Vietnam Kitchen’s top hot-and-spicy dishes, they must have stir-fried way more than 30,000 orders of it by now.
If the Lams were more boastful types, they could put out a flashing sign that boasts, “Nearly 50,000 K8’s sold!” (Yeah, I know I guesstimated 30,000, but hey, nobody fact-checks Mickey D’s “billions and billions” either, right?)
Continue reading Vietnam Kitchen: 50,000 K8’s Sold?
