Archive for the ‘Table Service’ Category

« Older Entries

Sandwich Spotlight: Blushing Monk.

February 22, 2012

The Subject: Blushing Monk from Founders Taproom and Deli.

Growing up, I loved spending my summers in Western Michigan, along the shores of Lake Macatawa, just a short walk away from the iconographic red lighthouse marking the channel to the big lake (Michigan, herself). I’ve ventured up to the area several times as an adult in the spring and summer, to visit old friends and relatives, to relive memories. This past weekend, I found myself in Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids and Holland, Michigan as a winter tourist, as a brewery tourist. With breweries — not memories — as our main destinations, I discovered parts of the cities I’d loved as a child that I didn’t know existed.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Destination: Appetite, Michigan, Sandwich Spotlight, Table Service, The Fifty | 1 Comment »

Friday Five: The Brooklyn Flea’s Winter Wares.

February 10, 2012

Jill: Brooklyn Flea: the weekly market that fittingly sells repurposed and crafty wares in a bank repurposed as a three-floor mall, filled to the brim with furniture, boots, hand towels and jewelry that we can only dream of owning and with people who are way cooler than you or I will ever be. Maya and I visited this past December with a mission: to visit as many of the basement food vendors as humanly possible. And although I became momentarily distracted and purchased a porcupine-screened tea towel, we completed our task with precision and professionalism. (Porcupines are obviously the new bacon-owl-mustache. Duh.)

Maya: Though the allure of the Flea has diminished for me (thanks both to the ubiquity of the mobile vendors and to my awareness of what vintage goods  bought at flea markets should cost), it was worth the trip just to introduce Jill to some of New York’s premiere food-truck players. Today’s Friday Five highlights some of the things we managed to stuff in our beaks.

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Bargain Bin, Friday Five, In The Neighborhood, New York City, Shacks, Carts & Trucks, Table Service | 1 Comment »

The Freelance Diet: How to Splurge.

February 9, 2012

When I started coming up with a list of topics for my Freelance Diet series, I never imagined that lobster would qualify for inclusion: That crustacean hasn’t screamed “budget cuisine” since the days when it was known as poverty food and only deemed suitable for prisoners and indentured servants.

To say things have changed would be an understatement, but fortunately for the modern-day lobster-lover, deals are still there if you know where to look—or even if you don’t. It’s not just $29 rolls (or even $14 rolls, for that matter) in this town.

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Bargain Bin, In The Neighborhood, New York City, Table Service, The Freelance Diet | Leave a Comment »

Delicious Transition.

January 23, 2012

One of my favorite Twitter hashtags is #firstworldproblems. For the Twitter uninitiated, it’s typically used when someone is complaining about bourgeois or tedious day-to-day issues that are not actually problems, a self-effacing nod to having the good life. So when I say that I needed a vacation from my vacation, I hereby acknowledge the ridiculousness of the statement. Nonetheless, it was true. After ten days of non-stop travel (during half of those one or both of us were sick), Ben and I needed a way to recover from our trip to London. We needed to rest. Luckily, I’d anticipated this happening, and booked a weekend stay at the Inn at Cedar Falls for the weekend after we’d return home.

This? It’s the opposite of the near panic attack I had on an over-crowded, over-heated Picadilly line where I accidentally stepped on a woman’s foot before hitting her head with my bag. And, happily, it’s only about an hour and a half from my house. In recent experiences, a trip to the destinations within the Hocking Hills of Southeast Ohio can seem like a trip to Disney World, with lines of crying children and gossipy octogenarians. And to be honest, Cedar Falls (which incidentally, has no cedars nearby), was no different.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Columbus, Ohio, In The Neighborhood, Table Service | Leave a Comment »

Breathing Room.

January 10, 2012

After ten minutes sandwiched between all of London and her tourists in Camden Market, I realized that in at least one way, living in the Midwest is a luxury. Space. We spent an afternoon getting caught in the current of foot traffic, wandering the stalls without stopping to look closely at anything designed to attract our attention along the way. To stop would mean to be run over, or to lose a member of our party. We’d gone to Camden to meet up with Sarah, Ben’s childhood friend, and we’d brought Elen, our London hostess along with us. With only a cup of coffee as our nourishment for the day, we were starving. While the food stalls in the market were tempting, we let Sarah talk us into visiting her favorite nearby pizza place. (The crowds helped persuade us, as did the underlying fear that any food near a tourist site was likely to be crap.)

In what was to become a tradition in our London dining experience, our initial goal (in this case, pizza) was just out of reach. (This happened several times during the trip; we’d get to a bistro that a friend recommended and find that the kitchen had closed seconds prior to our arrival, or we’d arrive at our destination restaurant to learn that they could only seat us at their second location, thirty minutes away.) Camden Bar and Kitchen had changed menus and its beloved stone-baked pizzas weren’t available for brunch on Sundays. Our server—who did not approve of this very recent change in operations—tried to talk the kitchen into serving us pizzas, to no avail. Brunch it would be.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Destination: Appetite, England, London, Passport Required, Table Service | Leave a Comment »

It’s Them, Not Me.

January 9, 2012

You can’t go home. That sounds so final, so bitter. Sometimes, you can’t go home. Or, to be more on point, sometimes home changes to a point where you don’t even recognize it. In this case, home isn’t even home. It is, instead, the place I spent most of my time in my temporary home of London, during the summer of 2000: Mezzo. A restaurant. I’ve written about it before. I’ve waxed poetically about the place to anyone who will listen, and if Facebook could somehow chronicle a Timeline for my mind (a terrifying concept), many Life Events would be connected to the place.

I knew that in the eleven years since I’d worked at the Soho restaurant, things had changed. For one, Mezzo had become Meza, and the place had changed ownership. Despite this knowledge, I couldn’t not visit it in my recent trip to London. On the first night in the city, I showed up on the doorstep of the restaurant, sans reservations and sans club attire. My super-duper fancy dining establishment had turned from the place that introduced me to mis en place and fruits de mer to what was essentially a club, a place that as a civilian, I would never enter. Instead, I was a woman on a mission: to touch base, at least emotionally, with twenty-one year-old me.

Once we walked in and looked at the menu, I had to have a stern conversation with myself: absolutely nothing would be the same and I could either enjoy my dining experience or lament the changes. The former would be way more interesting for my dining companions, so I tried to keep my commentary to a minimum. (This, of course, did not stop me from informing my first-day-on-the-job server that I once was in her shoes, but that on my first day, the building was on fire.) (True story.) (I’m sure that she didn’t care.) (I’ve turned into one of those people, the ones who show you pictures of their pets or grandchildren or announce that in this very building, eleven years ago, I ate a bowl of crème bruûlée in a stall in the server’s restroom so that the security guards wouldn’t see me stealing from the company.)

I seem to be doing it again. Right here.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Destination: Appetite, London, Passport Required, Table Service, Under The Table | Leave a Comment »

Old Friends.

December 20, 2011

When Ben and I planned our itinerary for the England trip this fall, most of our destinations had to do with the people we’d see. London had Elen, Sam and Sarah; Leeds was home to his sister Maria and Cambridge had Ben’s college roommate, Nate. The entire trip was a perfect vehicle to catch up with folks we hadn’t seen in ages.

While seeing Nate was the purpose of our one-day visit to Cambridge, we found ourselves wishing we’d scheduled more time to see the city, itself. It was pure joy to see history coinciding with every day life. Just one walk through made me want to spend days exploring every college, every path along the canal and, of course, every restaurant on its stone streets. (Stay tuned for a picture-only post of the sights of Cambridge.)

(more…)

Tags:,
Posted in Cambridge, Destination: Appetite, England, Passport Required, Table Service | Leave a Comment »

The Road To Peas.

December 7, 2011

I’m cursed. Every time I’ve traveled outside of Ohio in the past few years, I break my camera lens. The first time it happened, I was in the Philippines. Maya and I had to take a side trip to a mall in Manila for me to “barter” for a new lens. I dropped said lens in Asheville, North Carolina a year and a half later when trying to carry too much Indian food. For this most recent trip, I prepared myself. No longer would I schlep my camera around in a knapsack; if I want nice things, I have to take care of them. A blog post from Columbus photographer and design house, Genre Creative inspired me to look into carrying my beloved camera in a protective bag. Robin even lent me hers to try out for the trip.

I honestly don’t know what happened. Perhaps I opened the bag at a table to grab my journal to write something down, and failed to close it properly. Perhaps, after a little too many large glasses of wine (alcohol is legally required to be measured in England; as a result – large and small glasses of wine) I stood a little too close to a fellow bus rider who helped themselves to the contents on my back. Either way, my heart stopped when, while walking back to our friend’s place in Shoreditch, I heard my camera crash to the concrete, lens breaking away from the body. Again.

(more…)

Posted in Destination: Appetite, England, London, Passport Required, Table Service, Under The Table | 2 Comments »

Occupy The Coop.

November 21, 2011

It’s a strange thing, I think. My neighborhood houses some of the most creative, passionate and interesting foodies, food writers and food innovators in Columbus. What Clintonville lacks, though, are great dining establishments. It seems that for every Sage American Bistro, Ray Ray’s Hog Pit and Alana’s, we have four or five fast food chains or straight-from-the-GFS-can joints lining our streets. So when food trucks arrived to my part of the city, tipping the fare scale from “boring” and “meh” to “interesting” and “delicious”, our elected officials’ first impulse was to enforce obsolete laws that push them out of our area.

Perhaps The Coop’s location at Cliffside and Indianola is too close to the Clintonville border with Old North Columbus for our legislators to care. Or perhaps relying on the oncoming cold weather was an easier food truck deterrent. (Sound familiar, anyone?) I’m not sure why the relatively new truck owned and operated by Angie Theado seems immune to archaic laws, but I am thrilled to have this truck as a dining option in my neighborhood.

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Columbus, Ohio, In The Neighborhood, Shacks, Carts & Trucks, Table Service | 5 Comments »

Unsexy Coffee.

November 9, 2011

I’m not a coffee snob. When it comes down to it, I’m addicted to the stuff. If it doesn’t have chunks and is remotely lukewarm or hotter, I’ll drink it. When I get into places that specialize in sophisticated coffee drinks, I freeze. So when I walked into Terra Nera, the fast-paced Camden Market Italian coffee joint (filled to the brim with roughly six people per square foot) I panicked. I quickly scanned the complicated menu for something resembling a plain old coffee. The closest thing was caffè Americano. Of course. I’m the American in the Italian coffee shop in London ordering caffè Americano.

My barista was quick to point this out to me and yelled, “No. Not the Americano. Something sexy. You like sweet?”

(more…)

Tags:,
Posted in Destination: Appetite, England, London, Passport Required, Table Service | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.