Thursday, August 26, 2010
TRAVELS IN THE NEW WORLD: NYC—Maialino, A-; Kajitsu, A-; CT—Ola, B; Little Thai Kitchen, B-

“When I was growing up in Westport, Connecticut in the sixties and seventies, the default “good” restaurant was a place down near the train station called Manero’s, an Italian-American owned steakhouse with a brick walls covered with shiny copper cookware and jovial older waiters with accents of indeterminable origin…If the food at Manero’s was good, no one could ever have accused it of being interesting, but then in those days no one wanted food that was interesting. To be sure, Westport had an excellent Chinese restaurant, West Lake, and the Italian food at the Apizza Center in nearby Fairfield was wonderful, too, but aside from a couple of New England-y seafood places—The Clam Box, etc., and a “French” restaurant downtown where they flambéed everything, but most of all the bill, the town offered slim pickings for anyone who really loved good food with the exception of the rather mysterious Café Varna, which served, rather amazingly in retrospect, Bulgarian food…”Read more…

January 16, 2012
LES DELICES DE SHANDONG–At Last, Superb Chinese Food in Paris, A-/B+

“Before I extol Les Delices de Shandong in the 13th arrondissement, it’s obvious that I should offer a glimpse of my credentials as a critic of Chinese cooking, in this case, the superb regional kitchen of Shan Dong. Alas, as much as I feel qualified to write authoritatively on the American, British, French, Italian, Spanish and other Western kitchens, it’s best to admit that my knowledge of Chinese cooking is rather infantile, or to wit, it’s based very much on a personal primal reaction to what tastes good. Oh, to be sure, I grew up eating, and loving, ‘Chinese’ food of a sort, since Sunday night take-out meals from the excellent ‘West Lake’ in downtown Westport, Connecticut next to the public library, and the also good ‘Golden Door’ restaurant in a shopping center on U.S. 1, were a treat I craved as a suburban child with an insatiable hunger for new tastes and flavors, textures and ingredients.

“Mom would save the printed takeout menu from one order to the next in a drawer next to the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen, and around about 7pm on a Sunday, I’d poke my head around the corner every five minutes to see if she was sitting at the kitchen table filling out the menu before calling in the order. The only consolation for me if she wasn’t making fat gray Xs with a well gnawed yellow pencil was the possibility we’d be getting pizza instead–Mom understandably felt that she deserved a night off from shopping and cooking for a family of six, so Sunday was often takeout night, and the promise of favorite foreign foods blunted the terrible melancholy I always felt on the 7th day of the week.