The best summer days are like delicious meandering daydreams.
The thing about being adrift, slipping from salty stroll to hours lost in rediscovering an old love of a book, is that supper hour suddenly nears and the reverie is interrupted.
“S***,” you think. “What will we eat?”
Dorset boy has a plan. The pantry is almost bare, but the few things can prove useful: Fennel, garlic, tomatoes and penne.
Out comes the chopping board, and away we go …
It’s not every day that I look forward to eating at a cheeseball tourist trap.
The Fishermen’s Grotto in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, however, holds special meaning. Thirty years ago, when the sous chef was an undergrad at Stanford University, his father would breeze into town from their Iowa homestead and whisk him away to San Francisco.
There, the man would regale his son with stories of his own youth in 1950s San Francisco — and invariably, these trips would land the pair at a little place in the wharf. The old man would order a Shrimp Louis, remarking with prickly nostalgia that the pricey platter of creamy shrimp “used to cost just $3.50 back in the ’50s.” And over heaping plates of shrimp and fish, he would share the colorful stories of his bygone years.
So when the sous chef and I found ourselves in San Francisco last week, a visit to the old hangout became a must.
Battling sidewalks jammed with tourists and street artists offering to sketch our portraits, we wended our way along the breezy waterfront and found it: Fishermen’s Grotto, the very first restaurant in Fisherman’s Wharf …
Alright, so this is not quite a Wordless Wednesday — but I couldn’t very well have shown you this picture of risotto that looks like candy and not share the recipe now, could I?
There isn’t much of a story here — I had leftover roasted beets; I made risotto. Because it was tasty, I took a picture.
So here is the recipe below … buon appetito and enjoy!
Years ago, I found myself creeping along the quiet streets of a swath near Baltimore's Little Italy, squinting through the darkness as I tried to find Charleston, a restaurant that had been highly recommended.
Even though this roughly eight-block area was flanked by the perennially packed and fratty Fells Point on one side and the touristy Inner Harbor on the other at the time, its streets were still largely undeveloped in the late 1990s. Charleston, a Southern-inflected French restaurant, was an early adopter in the neighborhood and once we'd located it, we were glad we went. The meal was phenomenal and it was thrilling to be at a place that felt like it was on the cusp of something larger.
The husband and I recently returned to Baltimore for a short visit and decided to trek to Charleston to take a look at the place where we'd had one of the first romantic dinners of our courtship. The restaurant, helmed by the talented Cindy Wolf in the kitchen, is still there and hopping but the area around it has since become unrecognizable. Now named Harbor East, the area has sprouted gleaming condiminium, office and hotel buildings and has become as packed with restaurants, cafes and bars as its nearby neighborhoods. (You can check out a piece I wrote for the New York Times Travel section this past weekend on Harbor East here.)
Amid the current hubbub, a new little place caught our eye: Vino Rosina, a modern Italian restaurant in the Bagby Furniture Company Building, a historic red-brick structure that used to be a factory. Outside on the street, we could hear laughter wafting out along with the intoxicating smells of oven-roasted meats. So of course, we decided to step in and give the place a whirl …
It's been hard to ignore only the Most Significant Restaurant Opening in New York so far this year.
Since Jonathan Benno announced he would be leaving Per Se for Lincoln, an upscale Italian restaurant the Patina Restaurant Group was opening at Lincoln Center, the stories and blog items have been unceasing. Weeks before the restaurant opened late last month, the city's food Web sites were already aflutter with anticipation. Just days after it opened, food blogs were filled with photos of its eggplant parmesans and breathless accounts of transcendent meals there.
It's difficult to live up to such hype, but Benno, his crew and the beautifully sculpted setting, complete with a modern glass-walled kitchen in the heart of it all, they do it in spades.