Gangster of Food

If the gangster were rich, he would buy billboard space throughout the city of Portland that would give all current and would-be restaurateurs solid culinary advice about things that they often fuck up. First and foremost would be french fries.
French fries or pommes frittes if you want to get fancy are, as you may know, [...]

North American food is at a dead end. There are of course those fancy restaurants that proclaim to be serving some qualified version of American food, and Yankees can’t get enough “Southern Food”, the type that doesn’t include giblets, brains or chitlins, but mostly it cannot be found.
A trimmed down, fatted up institutionalized version of [...]

Portland suffers from culinary hubris. Everyone is an expert on such diverse topics as “How to properly share dishes when they are served in a small plates format” to “Which northwest beer is the bitterest, in terms of ibu’s”. In contrast, in my hometown of Cincinnati, it seems that people are content sticking to just [...]

Another thing that’s real hip is offal. Well, hip in the, “I had some at Babbo” sense. Not hip in the, “come on over, I got some kidneys on the Brinkman and some Valpolicella in the cellar” sort of sense. That is to say that, for the very, very intrepid foodie, offal is okay if [...]

Nettles are trendy. A bag weighing less than a pound costs about $4 at the farmers’ market. And they’re a dirty roadside weed. It takes maybe 5 minutes to pick a pound, less probably for a “professional” nettle forager, they’re common as grass, and you don’t even have to leave the city limits to find [...]

The season of the anniversary of my birth is a trying time for eaters. I daresay I tire of meat and roots and preserves. Nevertheless, with a little luck, a little patience, and an ample supply of reduced beef stock one may occasionally turn out something worth eating. Perhaps even relishing (I’ll try to stop [...]