Category Archives: THE SOUTH

August 7, 2012 · 4:12 pm

New Orleans Restaurant Recommendations from someone who should know

My sister-in-law-in-the-know (she was a restaurant critic for a major East Coast newspaper for years) suggests these restaurants in New Orleans (two of which I’ve already booked – Cochon and Boucherie):

Also found a good website with info on restaurants and beyond:

EAT new orleansMy sister-in-law-in-the-know (she was a restaurant critic for a major East Coast newspaper for years) recommends the following restaurants (two of which I’d already booked – cochon and boucherie):

Also found a good website for more info: www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/cuisine/restaurants.php

Cochon
A Mano
Arnaud’s (her favorite classic)
Irene
EAT (for brunch)
Stanley
Nola
Her saint
Dorky chase
Boucherie

Chef of the YEAR (2009)
Donald Link

Cochon, Cochon Butcher, Calcasieu, Herbsaint

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July 29, 2012 · 7:06 pm

Leaving wichita

It is really more accurate to say that we are leaving the best western hotel in park city, Kansas, just north of Wichita. We arrived there yesterday at 3pm and didn’t leave until midday today. There was no reason to leave since we came for a family reunion and it was 104 degrees outside. We did make it to Saigon  restaurant on. Broadway  hearty view Vietnamese lunch. (I had the bun as usual, a cold salad of greens, noodles, char broiled pork and egg roll, aka no. 45 on the menu.)

Now we are back in the car driving on interstate 35, another six hours drive north to Wichita. The corn is prematurely brown due to drought..burnt up is the technical term, my husband tells me. Lawns and brown, not their usual green. My brother-in-law, a cowboy in western Kansas report he is running out of pasture for his cattle to graze, it is now 106 on our car thermometer.

Restaurants recommended my various relatives during the reunion:in Kansas city, Lulu’s for Thai.. Chez Elle, crepes;  Amano in New Orleans.

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June 28, 2012 · 2:29 pm

Restaurants to try in NYC, San Fran, New Orleans and Chicago

On my flight home from DC this week, I found these restaurant recommendations in the Delta inflight mag, all looked good and all are in places I will be going soon (or have gone recently). They are:

New Orleans – Gautreau’s in the Uptown neighborhood (near where we’re staying in October.) Word has it reservations are a must. The place is dinky. The hot new chef there, Sue Zemanick is 25. Known for dishes with local fresh seafood – citrus-poached gulf shrimp, wild mushroom perogies.

Chicago – Grace, opening in September in the West Loop. Chef Curtis Duffy worked for Charlie Trotter AND Grant Achatz.

NYC and San Francisco – Mission Chinese (154 Orchard Street in NYC; 2234 Mission Street in San Fran) – unusual Cantonese fare by a Korean-born, Oklahoma-raised chef including “kung pao pastrami.”

 

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June 6, 2012 · 2:18 am

New Orleans restaurant to try

The back story on this restaurant is a bit disturbing but Boucherie sounds like a good place to eat in New Orleans.  The chef was shot three times during an attempted robbery, managed to survive and locals rallied to support him and his restaurant which is in the Carrollton neighborhood, where we’re staying.

According to a recent NYTimes story, Boucherie serves “moderately priced, beautifully plated food in a converted wooden house in the Carrollton District” with specialties including ” boudin balls, luscious pork belly served with sweet potato latkes and crème fraîche flavored with Vietnamese 5 spice powder,  blackened shrimp with grit toast, Intense smoked Wagyu beef brisket and mild, subtly sweet local redfish. Think I’d skip the  Krispy Kreme bread pudding.

Boucherie, 8115 Jeannette Street, New Orleans; (504) 862-5514; boucherie-nola.com. Dinner for two, without drinks, is about $50. Open lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Saturday.

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June 1, 2012 · 6:39 pm

Pok Pok and Barbuto in NYC; Frontera Grill in Chicago

Thought of  recent dining adventures in  NYC, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon,  the other day when I read a NYTimes story about where top chefs go on the rare occasion when they don’t eat at their own restaurant.  Chef Daniel Boulud goes to Barbuto for Chef Jonathan Waxman’s roasted chicken, which my brother also has discovered. I had a good meal there with my brother and his wife in 2011. Ike's Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings

Also on the dining front, is Pok Pok NY in Brooklyn and Pok Pok Wing (see photo above of Ike’s Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings)  on the Lower East Side.  My husband and I ate at the  original Pok Pok in Portland in 2010. (The chef Andy Ricker was named the Northwest’s best by the James Beard Foundation in 2011 so I bet it’s even harder to get a reservation now.) I see from the NYTimes that the two NYC-based Pok Poks have since opened. (Alas, we didn’t have the chicken wings when we went to Pok Pok in Portland. They look incredible! But it was very good Thai food by a non-Thai guy, which was the gist of the Times story. It also mentioned Rick Bayless and Frontera Grill/Xoco et. al.  in Chicago which I’ve been to many times over the years.)

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May 29, 2012 · 6:40 pm

Conflicted Thoughts about Wal-Mart’s largesse in Bentonville

We drove some backroads home from Eureka Spring, Arkansas yesterday – starting about 10 miles east in the town of Berryville, which turned out to be more down-on-its-luck than my guidebook suggested. Couldn’t help notice the huge and bustling Wal-Mart on the edge of town – a distinct contrast to the struggling town square business district. And couldn’t help but remember that Bentonville, which we visited Saturday, is the unusual small town that has clearly benefited economically from Wal-Mart – and that’s because it’s not a typical small town but a company town, Wal-Mart’s company town no less.  I can’t fault Wal-Mart  for wanting to make its company town look like the perfect American small town, squeaky clean with landscaped gardens and well-kept businesses,  but it’s a tad ironic considering the company’s reported disastrous effect on so many other small rural communities, where it has been accused of helping to shutter local businesses and suck the life out of  many a downtown.  (For details on the “Wal-Mart Effect” see: advocate.nyc.gov/news/2011-01-11/new-study-wal-mart-means-fewer-jobs-less-small-businesses-more-burden-taxpayers)

I don’t recall seeing this issue addressed at the Wal-Mart Visitor Center in Bentonville – although the center’s displays were more interesting than I expected.  (I was impressed and moved by the display recalling Wal-Mart’s aid to the Gulf Coast post-Hurricane Katrina.) One more question came to mind in downtown Bentonville – why so many law offices?  Granted the town square is dominated by the county  courthouse but still…Are they all fighting the good fight for Wal-Mart?

As for the Crystal Bridges Museum, while there,  I couldn’t help but feel grateful to the Wal-Mart heiress who opened it for sharing her stunning American art collection and vision, free of charge, with us little people. But again,  later, I did start to think a bit about the irony of this high-brow, high-culture palace being funded by the profits of a company whose stores are anything but high-brow, high culture;  a company that has not always treated or paid its employees well, and whose overall contribution to our economy, culture, and society is debatable. High-culture largesse is nothing new for corporate titans but sometimes its hard to decide whether what they give outweighs what they take, or have taken.

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May 28, 2012 · 3:26 am

Greetings from eureka springs Arkansas

I hardly recognized Eureka Springs. It was so packed with tourists on this holiday weekend that it was hard to detect its charm. The last time I was here, about 24 years ago, it was in december and the place was deserted.  Fortunately we were reminded why we like this place after we left  downtown with  it’s touristy shops and loud motorcycles . Walking along upper spring street past the lovely Victorian cottages with their long porches and gardens full of hydrangea, hollyhocks,roses and lilies; past stone grottos, steep curving lanes, dense woods; past the strange old  1886 crescent hotel, where we relaxed in white rocking chairs on the balcony overlooking the wooded mountains, I remembered the strange charm of this old town in northwest Arkansas. We are staying in an old motor court in a residential neighborhood. We have our very own one room cottage covered with small jagged rocks. Hence the name — rock garden cabins. Our neighbors are 90 year old newlyweds. No joke. We had a good lunch at the mud street cafe and excellent BBQ ribs at bubba’s and also enjoyed a visit to thorn crown chapel. A stunning glass-walled chapel deep in the woods that was part of the inspiration for the architecture at crystal bridges.

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May 27, 2012 · 3:08 am

Greetings from bentonville,ar–crystal Bridges museum. Wow!

We were not disappointed by Crystal Bridges museum here. We were bowled over. It is not like any museum I have been to. The museum is a series of dramatic copper,stone, wood and glass buildings built over a ravine deep in the woods.Everything about it is  impressive. The architecture, modern American art collection, the stunning landscaped trails adorned with sculpture and gardens, the gorgeous museum restaurant with sophisticated  but affordable food, the innovative children’s area (which we adults learned from too). Did I mention it’s all free, including the shuttle that took us from a nearby park to the museum’s dramatic entrance –a tower with a wide view of the museum’s spread out grounds. The collection is varied, impressive and beautifully displayed in well laid out spaces. I saw both familiar and unfamiliar artists work.

We also poked around the very spiffy town square, including the Walmart visitors center, disguised as an old five and dime. It’s where Sam Walton’s first store was and we were surprised to find the displays interesting. Dinner was at aq chicken in Springdale, full of photos of bill Clinton from his chicken eating days. We are staying at a refreshingly nice microtel, a major step up from the awful days inn we stayed at last night in butler,mo. Also had good frozen custard at Andy’s down the road in Rogers,Ark.  Oddly, there is another one in Evanston,Illinois where our son goes to college. Anyway, this is my first post via iPad. Cool. And we had a really nice 22nd anniversary today.

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May 25, 2012 · 5:37 pm

Off to Arkansas for the weekend

Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs

Arkansas? Yes. Arkansas. I’m surprised by how surprised my fellow Iowans seem that we’re going to Arkansas for Memorial Day weekend (and to mark our 22nd wedding anniversary). True, it is a long drive  for a three day weekend – about 6.5 hours to Bentonville. (Bentonville? Yes. Bentonville). But we like road trips and stopping along the way at whatever grabs our attention. And we like Arkansas. We haven’t been there in over, um, 22 years, come to think of it, but Eureka Springs (where we’ll be staying on Sunday night) is a pretty old Ozarks resort town with old hippies and avid Christians, as I recall.

We’re staying overnight at bare bones motel in Butler, Mo; then driving to Bentonville on Saturday, where we’ll visit the new Crystal Springs, a new American art museum  created by a Wal-Mart heiress that’s designed by Moshe Safdie.  (The museum showcases a reportedly impressive art collection and also has a sculpture garden and nature trails that wind through 120 acres of forests, gardens and ponds.) We’ll eat at AQ (“Arkansas Quality”) Chicken in nearby Springdale/

On Sunday we’ll explore Eureka Springs and splurge on non-motel accommodations, staying at Rock Cottage Gardens, a spruced up former motor court. Dinner options include Gaskins Cabin (for steak) or Ermillios or DeVito’s (Italian.) Several restaurants aren’t open on Sunday including Bubba’s which looks like it has good bbq. Not sure if Mud Street Cafe is open.

We may also stop in Joplin, Mo. en route to see how the city is recovering from the horrendous tornado that leveled a large part of the city a year ago. (We’ve been driving for several years through Greensburg, Ks. and watching it rebuild after a tornado several years ago.)

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May 11, 2012 · 2:24 pm

Oregon greatest hits (from our 2010 trip there)

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law are going to Portland, Oregon and driving down to Sonoma, Ca. Don’t know their route but here are some greatest hits from our visit there two years ago. For more details, click on the “Portland” and “Oregon” categories on my blog:

Portland:

We stayed at Cafe Deluxe (fun, funky, reasonably priced).  Cafe Lucia is sister hotel, more centrally located, place where masseuse accused poor Al Gore of groping her awhile back. Or some such.

Columbia River Gorge: well worth the drive. Columbia River gorge, old observatory, Multnomah (sp?) Falls, crossing the bridge to Stevenson, WA.

Restaurants, starting with the best on down (all good): Pok Pok (strange Thai place – book way ahead); Kenny and Zuke’s deli; Clyde Commons, Portland Farmer’s Market.

Oregon coast:

Newport:  Sylvia Beach Hotel (homage to writers, quirky place) and Saffron Salmon (probably our best meal in Oregon and we wouldn’t have found it without strong recommendation from locals) Check out nearby Salishan Lodge and Yakina Head Lighthouse

Manzanita: pretty beach; stayed at good place

Cannon Beach: too manicured

Astoria: didn’t get there. next time!

Jacksonville: Rouge River Valley wine tasting, beautiful area near Medford

Ashland: Again near Medford – excellent Shakespeare, shopping, restaurants.

Crater Lake: gorgeous

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