SaltShaker

I can eat Japanese food pretty much any time. I’ve always liked it, even when I was a kid I was fascinated by it from afar. I have no idea why, I’d never tried it, I’d only read about it. There just weren’t any Japanese restaurants in my hometown. There were no Japanese kids in […]

Louisville, Kentucky - I’ve been out of the midwest for 23 years, and rarely make it back there, or to the bible belt. Except on occasional visits to family members, I have a tendency to forget that many of the folk of those regions are, well, large. Girth, that is. A lot of the cause […]

Louisville, Kentucky - Who’s the turkey with a taste for homicide? So reads the subtitle on Mary Daheim’s Fowl Prey. Publisher’s Weekly referred to it as “light and cozy fare.” Given my experience with the last two “murder mysteries” I barely wanted to crack the wishbone on this one. The subtitle wasn’t helping.
Thankfully, I was […]

New York City - For my last night back in New York there was clearly no other option than to have a really exceptional sushi dinner. My friends Efraim and Efrat, from the building I used to live in. joined me at one of our favorite places in the East Village, Koi, 175 2nd Avenue. […]

New York City - Pair up a third generation chef from a Saigon family of restaurateurs and one of New York’s better pastry chefs and you’re in for some truly fascinating creations. Welcome to bôi, 246 East 44th Street. Situated roughly midway between Grand Central Station and the United Nations, this hot little Vietnamese fusion […]

New York City - It’s hard to believe that I’ve been in New York for a full week and haven’t gotten out for a bagel! Maybe I wasn’t missing them as much as I thought I was. But I found myself in the East Village this morning and decided to stop in at an old […]

New York City - Continuing on with my reading of “first novels” of food related mysteries, I moved on to JoAnna Carl’s The Chocolate Cat Caper. Her name is a pseudonym for a “multipublished mystery writer.” That worried me right off the bat. This is supposed to be a mystery. She, or he, is a […]

New York City - I was given advice by someone who supposedly knows about such things. So I took it. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel that has a lot of food and wine in it, but is something in the vein of a thriller, or murder mystery, or crime sort […]