#ALSO WHILE I WAS AWAY i discovered cheesecake factory ICE CREAM

[violetganache42]

I HAVE RETURNED FROM TENNESSEE!

God, this is like, what? The second time I've used this GIF?

Man, these past few days have been an enjoyable experience for me. I don't even know where to begin! Oh, wait… I actually do. I think it’s best for me to break it all down day by day.

* * *

Friday

As previously mentioned, Thursday night marked the start of the mini-hiatus because Mom and I had to make sure we could catch our 6:55 AM flight to Nashville on time. Needless to say, we only got a few hours of sleep; however, thanks to us getting the caffeine from our colas and trying to nap on the plane, we were awake enough to explore the downtown Nashville area.

As you may have guessed, Nashville is a popular place for country music and a lot of the attractions in the Lower Broadway area is full of clubs and honky-tory bars. No matter where you go, day or night, there is always a bar where people perform country music live for the patrons.

Nashville also happens to be the place that harbors the Johnny Cash Museum, which was the first stop of the weekend.

As you can tell from the first image, this artifact was made entirely out of steel that was salvaged from the destroyed World Trade Center, which is where the One World Trade Center/Freedom Tower currently stands. The second image is a piece of memorabilia: the Martin D-35 guitar Johnny Cash used when he was alive as it was his favorite Martin guitar to play on stage for two decades.

Speaking of country music, Nashville had recently hosted this year's CMA Music Festival and Garth Brooks took home the award for Entertainer of the Year. I wasn't even sure if it was coincidental or not since this weekend in Tennessee was primarily about his concert, but I'll get on that later. In the meantime, another neat place we checked out was the Country Music Hall of Fame… well, specifically some of the gift shops.

Yes, one of the gift shops has a wall filled with nothing but records from all kinds of country artists.

Outside of the country-related sights, we also checked out a couple more places within the Nashville area like a local candy store called the Candy Kitchen. Everywhere you look, there were all kinds of store-brand and local candy, caramel apples, fudge, ice cream, etc. Combine that with the aroma of pure sugar and you end up either feeling like you've gone to candy heaven or your teeth ended up rotting because of how many sweets this place had.

They even have giant ass Dum Dum lollipops for crying out loud! Like, how the hell are you supposed to eat something that huge?!

Later that afternoon, we weren't sure what to do in Nashville between the bars, party tractors, and what not, mostly because we weren’t in the mood to check everything out due to the little amount of sleep we got. As a result, we did a bit of online searching and found a pretty cool mall not far from the state's capital.

Yep. That's right. That is what this mall is called. The name alone was enough to give me Sonic vibes and I'm certain y'all know why. Hell, they even had three parking lots each labeled emerald, gold, and ruby; I lowkey wished they added four more parking lots and have them named after sapphire, amethyst, diamond, and aquamarine just so it can keep reminding me of Sonic, you know? Specifically the seven Chaos Emeralds? ...*coughs*...

Anyways, that's kinda how Mom and I spent the rest of our Friday: having dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and poking at some shops they had before returning to Nashville to see what it was like at night. I will say this right now: they fucking love partying.

Saturday

The next day of the trip was mostly spent driving up to Knoxville for the Garth Brooks concert, which I was able to get a decent number of photos because it was crazy. When Mom got the tickets, she said it was going to be a stadium concert and I thought it was going to be similar to Taylor Swift's concert at Gillette Stadium in terms of crowds, but holy shit! Was I wrong! When you've got a college football stadium filled with 84,000 people attending, it's bound to get fucking cramped, so comparing both stadium tours, this easily takes the cake for the wildest concert I've ever been to thus far. Nevertheless, I still managed to have fun.

Because the Tumblr app—as far as I know—only allows 10 photos per post, I decided to condense some of my favorite photos I've taken for the rest of the trip into collages to try and satisfy the limit, but it appears I may have made more collages than I anticipated, so the rest of this post will be typed via laptop. To kick off the series of collages, here are some of my favorites pictures I’ve taken of Garth.

Sunday

Sunday was the last day of our weekend in Tennessee, so having done the stuff mentioned above, how did we spend the majority of yesterday? By driving through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge, with the latter being the home of Dollywood!

Before going on this trip, Mom and I discovered Dollywood wasn't far away from Knoxville, the same town where the concert at the University of Tennessee was held. She tried to figure out ways to make additional plans to go to Dollywood to see their Christmas traditions, but we ultimately chose to save it for another time because we wanted to make sure we arrived at the airport early enough to board.

On that note, what proved to be the icing on the cake for this trip was what Mom would call a happy accident: viewing the Great Smoky Mountain Range.

The collage with the light blue background is a portion of the several photos I've taken of the Great Smokies as we were driving through a road in Sevierville that offered wonderful views from the distance. The one with a wooden background is during our trek through the mountain range; on top of the photo of the national park sign, we made a few stops along the way because those stops had some marvelous views.

And now comes the pièce de résistance. The happy accident of this trip. While taking pictures of the views at the first stop, we noticed some buildings down below; a couple of them resembled hotels, but we weren't sure what the rest were. As we were leaving the mountains, we immediately entered what we saw from above: Gatlinburg.

We didn't take a lot of pictures there because we were too mesmerized with what Gatlinburg had to offer as we were driving through: shops, an aquarium, museums, ski lifts, hiking, and so on. Everywhere we looked, there was nothing but endless entertainment, just like Pigeon Forge! They are even all decorated for the Christmas season, and honestly, I definitely wouldn't mind spending Christmas in Gatlinburg in the foreseeable future. Renting a cabin, seeing what the resort has to offer, my sisters and brother-in-law joining with Mom, my brothers, and myself to celebrate the holidays. That would be super amazing. ☺️

* * *

Anyways, that pretty much sums up the major events of my weekend hiatus. Posting and queueing on my main and Sonic blogs respectively will return to its regular schedule. Plus, a little something I've been thinking about doing, but what is it? You'll have to find out when the time is right. ;) Until then, see you guys later!

#my post #personal #update #nashville #johnny cash #knoxville #university of tennessee #garth brooks #sevierville #pigeon forge #dollywood #dolly parton #great smoky mountains #gatlinburg

[travelonlinetips-blog]

New Post has been published on https://travelonlinetips.com/the-abosolute-best-food-experiences-you-can-have-in-queensland/

The abosolute best food experiences you can have in Queensland

If your stomach rules the roost when it comes to holiday decision-making, you want to ensure you have the crème de la crème of best food options when you touch down in a new destination.

We’re not talking Insta-trendy fads, but longstanding favourites worth travelling for. From meat pies that had Hugh Jackman returning day after day to a lasagne that’s been on the menu for almost 30 years, these are must-eat dishes for every foodie.

Start your appetites!

BRISBANE

Taro’s Ramen

What started as a humble ramen joint has blossomed into four Japanese restaurants across Brisbane with the flagship sitting in the 480 Queen St building (you’ll also find Taro’s in South Brisbane, Ascot, and Taro’s Express on Edward St in the CBD).

The star of this show, of course, is Taro Akimoto’s addictive tonkotsu broth, made from sweet Bangalow pork bones. You’ll also find sukemen, shio, shoyu and miso varieties alongside a list of izakaya-style snacks, sakes, shōchū and Japanese beers.

Number 75 on Delicious‘ magazines Delicious 100 list, they say the shoyu pork ramen is a must-try although “Akimoto’s chicken karaage is arguably the best in town”. Extra bonus: Taro’s also dishes out gluten-free and vegan ramens proving there is a food god.

Sand crab lasagne at Il Centro

Nothing says Queensland like sand crabs and sunshine. At Brisbane institution, Il Centro, they’ve perfected the balance between the delicate sweetness of the crab and a creamy crustacean-infused sauce. They’ve also been turning out the lip-smacking dish for 26 years, having been a star of the menu since the restaurant opened in 1992.

It’s so good, they sell around 350 plates of the Lasagna alla Granseola every week.

GOLD COAST

Bug roll, Rick Shores

To make an appearance at Rick Shores, even if only for a cocktail, and not stay for a bug roll would be almost sacrilege, given the cult adoration and Sriracha-heightened perfectness of these bundles of brioche magic.

Inside, crispy chunks of bug meat in a tempura style batter are paired with gem lettuce, kaffir-lim laced mayo and just the right kick of chilli.

Number 1 in the Delicious 100 list and in the Top 100 in the Gourmet Traveller Australian Restaurant Guide, this hot spot in Burleigh Heads has just re-opened after some minor renovations, with even more expansive views over the ocean than before.

SUNSHINE COAST

Whole crispy fish at Spirit House

No matter how many times you order the whole crispy fish from Spirit House, each new bite is a revelation. The premise is simple: take the fish of the day (many times, barramundi), fry the skin crisp, and smother it in chilli tamarind sauce. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t have to be.

Hidden away in the Sunshine Coast town of Yandina, amongst five acres of tropical gardens and set around a tranquil pond, a meal here should be experienced by everyone at least once in their lives.

SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND COUNTRY

Apple pie from Suttons

We don’t have the pie culture of middle America but there’s one place where the slice of pie lives up to USA portion expectations and that’s Suttons Juice Factory and Cidery in Stanthorpe.

There was a time when you could visit the farm to pick your own apples, but the business beast took over and they now use their entire orchard for the shed shop and cafe.

A word to the wise: Split a serve of the apple pie, served with spiced cider-laced vanilla ice-cream, between two. Suttons also serve individual gluten-free apple pies.

OUTBACK QUEENSLAND

Curried camel pie from Birdsville Bakery

Can a pie be worth the 1580km drive across the belly of Australia? You betcha. In fact, the notoriety of Birdsville’s curried camel pie is partly what led a savvy businessman to buy the local bakery for $1.2 million in 2016.

Just how popular are they? Around 12,000 pies are sold during the infamous Birdsville Races every year.

Peach Blossoms from Merino Bakery in Longreach

There’re just some bakery treats that are good enough to withstand the trials and tribulation of faddish cruffins, injectable donuts and the cupcake mania of 2005, and a lot of it’s got to do with the men and women behind the baking trays.

In Longreach, the Merino Bakery is famous for its (incidentally, totally Insta-worthy) Peach Blossoms – millennial pink lamington halves sandwiched together with cream. They’re so good, rumour has it one tray sold for $90 at an auction one time.

SOUTHERN GREAT BARRIER REEF

Macadamia ice-cream from Mammino’s in Childers

The problem with food trends is too often than not, the roar deafens out the reality and you’re left with a substandard experience and a “I was here” photo or review, just for the sake of it.

But upon wrapping your lips around the creamy macadamia ice-cream, hand-churned onsite at Mammino in Childers, 54km south-west of Bundaberg, you’ll realise this sweet treat is worth every click of the speedo to get there.

The business changed hands in 2017 but original owners, Anthony and Teena Mammino developed the iconic ice-cream with a recipe from Teena’s grandmother and macadamias grown on their farm.

Hervey Bay scallops at COAST, Hervey Bay

If you’re going to try this town’s namesake seafood, you need to go straight to the top and order a plate of grilled Hervey Bay scallops, artfully arranged on a plate of black pebbles, at COAST restaurant.

Smothered with just the right amount of coriander butter and sprinkled with hazelnut crumb, this is a dish you’ll dream about for years to come.

WHITSUNDAYS

Mango sorbet from The Big Mango in Bowen

It’s not hard to know if you’re in the right spot when it comes to your hunt for one of Queensland’s most iconic (and healthy!) treats.

Churned fresh on the premises, in the shadow of Bowen’s Big Mango, the visitor information centre is the spot to try delicious local mango sorbet.

Jochheim’s Pies

If they’re good enough for Hugh Jackman, they’re good enough for us! One of the best pit-stops in Bowen, north of Airlie Beach, Jochheim’s line-up of tasty pastries attracted the star while the cast of Australia were based in Bowen for filming back in 2007. (Fun fact: Owner Merle Jochheim can be credited with hooking Baz Luhrmann in during his location scouting, as she regaled him with the history of Bowen thinking he was just another customer.)

Order a Hunky Jackman Beef Pie or if you’re stopping by on a Thursday, they also do a creamy prawn pie with locally-caught seafood.

Tropical North Queensland

Crocodile cheesecake at Silky Oaks Lodge

Lyrics may warn to “never smile at a crocodile” but in the treehouse restaurant of Silky Oaks Lodge, hovering above the Mossman River, the tables are turned with a brain-twisting, smile-inducing savoury crocodile cheesecake.

The crocodile and tarragon cheesecake with smoked barramundi, pickled papaya and chutney and herb salad is friendlier than you think, tasting more like chicken with the texture of a soufflé.

Flames of the Forest

We’ve got a thing for eating our coat of arms in Oz, but if you’re going to go native, Flames of the Forest is one of the best spots to do it.

Transported to a secret rainforest location underneath a canopy of fairy lights and crystal curtains, you won’t quickly forget the Aboriginal Cultural experience or its signature dish: Lemon myrtle infused kangaroo loin on a bed of wild rocket and toasted macadamia nuts garnished with homemade fig chutney.

Hungry for more? Maybe you’ll discover the next iconic dish at one of these food festivals!

What rates as the best food experiences from your time in Queensland? Share with us below.

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[thiswillbereportedtomanagement]

GQ's Best New Restaurants in America, 2018Every January, just after new year's, I set out across America in search of what we at GQ call the Perfect Night Out. What does that mean? Well, that's a good question. The easy part of the answer is that I'm looking for superlative restaurants that have opened in the past 12 to 18 months, the places we deem the best newcomers in the land. What makes them “perfect” is more complicated, and figuring that out for myself anew is, in some ways, precisely the purpose of each year's travel. I could give you a list of traits that the new restaurants I love nearly always display: ambition, artistry, heart, style, humor, familiarity, surprise, comfort, conscientiousness, craft—in addition to the more traditional restaurant qualities through which those are filtered, like deliciousness, hospitality, value, service, design, and so on. But the exact way in which any number of those will come together in a particular space, on a particular night, in a way that makes you say, “This. This is the only place in the world I want to be eating right now”—that remains something of a wonderful mystery.Which is what gave me hope in a year that provided abundant reasons to be depressed about dining out, even to wonder whether restaurants should still exist at all. There have been times when it's seemed that behind every inviting dining room lies, as Boston Globe critic Devra First memorably put it, “a Hieronymus Bosch tableau of struggling operators, lascivious chefs, and broke staffers.” To those who believe the only answer is to burn it all down, the 13 new restaurants in which I enjoyed this year's Perfect Nights Out—not to mention dozens of others that offered wonderful moments and meals—are, to my mind, the best argument for why restaurant culture is worth fighting to change, so that restaurants may live on. Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em. The other purpose of my annual journey—this year, nearly 75 restaurants across 18 cities—is to try to tease out a picture of the dining moment, some overarching theme or through line that sums up what it means to eat out in America today. This year, I threw up my hands. On an eight-degree January day in Chicago, in search of where things might be headed, I stopped into a new branch of a fast-casual dumpling chain billed as the city's first totally automated dining experience. It was fun ordering on a touch screen and then watching a bank of high-tech Automat windows for my name to appear alongside little dancing cartoon dumplings. Then the one visible employee, tasked with helping customers order while the rest presumably toiled backstage, leaned in over my shoulder and whispered: “It's the future, bro.” My first reaction was feeling like that eight-degree wind had just blown through my body. My second was to think, Get in line, bro. Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em. We've got more futures than we know what to do with—big, small, formal, casual, avant-garde, nostalgic, all of it up for grabs. (You get a taste of the schizophrenia in the taxonomic mania that has overtaken menus: HOT SMALL PLATES, SMALL COLD PLATES, SNACKS, BITES; FROM THE LAND; FROM THE SEA; FROM THE FIRE. Or perhaps monsieur would just like something from BOWLS?) With a few gloriously messy exceptions, the restaurants I love are ones that approach the question with some kind of clarity, a purposeful path through the clutter. The other great part of my job, of course, is that no two of those paths ever seem to be quite the same.This was the year I saw perhaps the last thing I expected to see in any restaurant, anywhere: a comment card in a David Chang restaurant. This one came with the check at Majordōmo in Los Angeles, where Chang has been spending more and more of his time. “How did we do?” it asked cheerily, followed by a range of smiley faces like those on the International Pain Scale. None of them showed a face contorted in the kind of anguish I imagined a younger Chang might have felt had he been able to look ahead to this moment. Chang, to quickly refresh, began his career as the very embodiment of client- directed hostility. Momofuku was the Kingdom of No: to substitutions, to seat backs, to dessert, to photos. Had it not been for the inconvenience of his being in the food-selling business, you got the feeling he might have done away with customers altogether.You're greeted at Majord-omo, which sits all but alone in an industrial neighborhood on the northern edge of Chinatown, by a brigade of hosts as plentiful and polite as von Trapp children. Looking up at the bay of mullioned windows, you might think the space was used to overhaul engines by day, but below there are comfy sling-back chairs, large, soothing paintings by James Jean, a soundtrack of Steely Dan. You could argue that, for all his kitchen innovation, Chang's primary vocation has been as a restless explorer of American restaurant forms—from fast food to fine dining. This confident, comfortable place is his utopian Cheesecake Factory, an impression aided by the kitchen's use of a loudspeaker ordering system that mimics the call of “Party of two” across a mall's tiled byways.What I'm trying to say is that Majordōmo is really, really, disconcertingly, nice. On the wet and chilly night I was there, Chang was in the kitchen sending out complimentary bowls of hot soup to those huddling outside on the patio. (It was a broth of miso, peas, and Benton's ham, the kind of sort-of southern, sort-of Asian, sort-of farmers'-market-driven creation on which Chang has made his bones for well over a decade now.) Even the name Majordōmo starts things off with a punny kiss of gratitude (domo is the casual Japanese term for “thanks”). It must be maddening to other restaurateurs that Chang, in addition to all his other talents, seems to have a bag of perfect restaurant names lying around. This one manages to also evoke Chang's ongoing fascination with the intersections of Italian and Asian cuisines, a theme he attacked in a more awkward manner at his last major New York opening, Nishi. You see it play out in tapioca lo mein, a purse-shaped spiral of spaghetti-sized noodles slicked with pork fat and twirled with rapini and an underlying bass line of preserved krill. Or in the waves of fermented-fish funk coming off the “bagna càuda” bathing a wedge of braised cabbage. Majordōmo riffs on the craze for Middle Eastern dining, serving steaming bing bread alongside spicy lamb and a hummus-like dip made with a fermented-chickpea substance that Momofuku has trademarked as Hozon. I can't think of a single dish that spans more cultures than what is simply billed as California Rock Crab; from left to right you get simply steamed claws served with a Meyer-lemon mayo, a shell filled with crab-fat rice, and a faithfully spicy version of the Korean marinated raw crab called ganjang gejang. I'm not sure they really make sense on the same plate, but in that, the blend of dissonances and connections, it screams nothing more clearly than Los Angeles.And, of course, all of the components are delicious, which is Chang's gift, even if he has sometimes seemed to think of it as a curse. Majordōmo may be his most unconflictedly delicious restaurant, and his most fun. Chang has said that his generation of chefs were like child actors, unprepared for the outsize cultural role they happened to fall into and struggling to figure out adulthood while in the public eye. Some, the implication goes, are Jodie Fosters; others are named Corey. Majordōmo proves he's in the former camp.If I have any objection to Majordōmo, it's that it was part of a disturbing trend of Big Important Restaurants taking up my usually more freewheeling meals in Los Angeles—my favorite dining city of the year. It was no small consolation that one of those was David Beran's Dialogue, which has 18 seats and is located in what appears to be a repurposed storage closet on the second floor of a Santa Monica food court. Beran is an alumnus of Grant Achatz's kitchens in Chicago, most recently as executive chef at Next, the restaurant that during his tenure changed its entire menu and concept every four months. Quite reasonably, he took some time off after moving to L.A., during which he engaged in such ordinary-person vacation projects as charring, pressing, and barrel-aging hundreds of pounds of onions to create gallons of burnt-onion syrup. If anybody tried to imitate it, he said gleefully, while I sat in front of his station at Dialogue's chef's counter, they were already a full year behind.The onion syrup shows up as a deep smoky note in a dish of maitake mushrooms and smoked-date puree, but not before you've had to find your way into Dialogue's windowless hidey-hole. To get there, you follow a series of e-mailed instructions that involve a dark alley and an unmarked steel door. It's kind of thrilling, but also kind of a cheat, given that you could have just taken the escalator up past the ice cream shop and grab-and-go grain bowls.The menu is built around seasons. Beran plans to change it entirely every three to four months. Mine, perversely, began with tastes of summer, though outside it was full January. You could almost detect the joy of a recent émigré from Chicago discovering L.A.'s season-less farmers' markets in the opening act: a geodesic dome of strawberry bubbles over pork belly and caviar. We proceeded through summer—a green leaf of choy sum, stuffed with strawberry nam prik, standing like a lonely tree atop cashew puree and a dusting of freeze-dried strawberries; a finger of lobster in béarnaise sauce, tucked under a blanket of nasturtium leaves, fennel pollen, and fermented-tomato powder; chamomile shortbread with olive-oil custard and whipped honey. And with that semi-dessert, we looped back and began autumn. Too often in this kind of cooking what you miss is…cooking: the smells and sounds of heat applied to ingredients. Early on in this meal, Beran began pan-searing what I thought of as Chekhov's Duck: Appearing in the first act, I thought, it damn well better pay off in the third. This one did, in the form of crisp-skinned breast, a dish of unctuous rillettes, and a sauce made from the carcass in an old-fashioned French duck press.Despite the restaurant's name—which strikes me as being awfully close to that of a fragrance you see ads for around Christmas, probably starring Johnny Depp—I found that my dinner was strikingly quiet, without a lot of the over-explaining that often accompanies such meals. Consequently, you might miss Easter eggs along the way, like the fact that each dish contains at least one element of the one that came before, or that the sound system plays only entire albums straight through, a conscious echo of how Beran wants you to view the meal as a coherent work. No matter: The sensual pleasures here are equal to the intellectual ones; the food speaks for itself. It was my favorite new restaurant of the year.Everything you need to know about the growing meaninglessness of traditional dining categories is that $220-per-diner Dialogue is described on Google Maps as a “New American Bistro.” If that descriptor applies anywhere, it's Julia Sullivan's Henrietta Red, in Nashville, where simple dishes are made dazzling by tiny details: littleneck clams dabbed with a bright escabeche of Calabrian chile and pineapple vinegar and roofed with a single nasturtium leaf; salty cured egg yolk in a beef tartare; the touch of smoked olive in a nourishing lamb sausage with lentils or the bite of whole-grain-mustard emulsion on a simple but shining fillet of wild striped bass.Is it strange that some of the best seafood I ate all year was in notably landlocked Tennessee? Hardly. Two of the best gumbos I've eaten in years were served to me in Seattle and North Carolina—which to many old-line New Orleanians might as well be Seattle for all the kinship it has with the Big Easy. The North Carolina version was at Hello, Sailor, a fantastical midcentury-modern surf shack located on the shore of Lake Norman, in the town of Cornelius, a half hour north of Charlotte. In the summer, I gather, the area is a bustling vacation spot; boaters can approach from the lake and tie up beneath the restaurant's patio. In the middle of winter, it appeared at the end of a pitch-dark road like a hallucination—all buttery wood ceilings, candy-colored fireplaces, and sexy curves. The food riffs on the kind of dishes you might have gotten at the building's previous incarnation as a dockside joint called the Rusty Rudder: crab dip spiked with pimiento cheese and crusted with brown-butter bread crumbs and benne seeds; fried bologna on a roll topped by a near solid caul of poppy seeds; soft serve for dessert. If the haute college-food-hall presentations sometimes veer toward too cute—ribs and shrimp calabash arrive on a tiny cafeteria tray—tastes like that of the gumbo make you forgive a lot: shrimpy, slippery, deep and inky as the water of the quiet lake outside the wide picture windows.The other gumbo was equally dark and contained shrimp, fried in a batter crispy enough to hold its crunch within the murk, and with a housemade Louisiana-style hot link. This was at JuneBaby, chef Edouardo Jordan's astonishing restaurant in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood. If the idea of a great southern restaurant in the Northwest makes you skeptical, consider the benefits. Freed from any particular region of southern cooking, Jordan can roam: from the gumbo-lands of Louisiana up to Georgia and the Carolinas, where he picks up supple strips of fried pigs' ears, drizzled in spicy honey, down to Florida, where the “rice of the day” might be an almost pudding-like confection with coconut and conch.Jordan, who is himself from the Sunshine State, also dodges the dread bullet of “elevation”—a term of defensive insecurity that still gets thrown around when people feel the need to justify restaurant treatment of supposedly low-lying southern cuisine. His food may draw on high-kitchen technique, but it feels no need to apologize or protest on the plate. There's no better example than an appetizer of chitlins, or pig intestines, here served over rice in a rich pork stock. Like the French sausage andouillette, another example of Deep Offal, chitlins provoke a fleeting crisis between brain and stomach, a moment when the mind teeters on the edge, deciding whether to react to the incoming data with revulsion or desire. Then you—or at least I—find yourself downing the entire bowl in ravenous, breathless gulps. On the other end of the spectrum, but no less boldly straightforward, is peach brown Betty, done as it should be: piping hot and barely a knuckle deep, so that each bite is chewy, buttery, and crusty at once.The chitlins, too, are representative of a restaurant that is explicitly about the story of southern food as African-American food—from a hot toddy with rum, the spirit most closely entwined with slavery, to the creamer peas, a legacy of West Africa served here alongside a thick and gravy-covered chicken-fried steak. This is a meal that is narrative without being pedantic. It could only be improved by taking reservations and avoiding the stress of a waiting-list system that keeps tables empty while crowds push up against diners in the bar. More than enough people want to taste Jordan's food; making it more difficult than it needs to be is downright inhospitable, regardless of the latitude.It was, of course, the year of Fire and Fury. Or at least, in restaurants, fire: Across the land, flames continue to blaze in every open kitchen. I guess it's only a matter of time before a restaurant actually places tables inside the fire. Until that day, there's Maydān, hidden down an alley in the U Street neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with an open-fire kitchen located smack in the center of the dining room. Trussed lamb shoulders hang above, turning amber in the smoke, which exits through a soaring copper chimney. A team of chefs led by Gerald Addison and Chris Morgan labor at primitive stations, losing eyebrows and knuckle hair as they tend whole chickens, marinated in coriander, garlic, and turmeric, and lamb kebabs spiked with pistachio. With the baffling exception of bland pita bread that is by turns undercooked and cracker-like, everything is delicious, but the fire's most salubrious effect may be on those gathered around it: Conversations break out among neighboring tables at a rate that one feels wouldn't happen if the fire wasn't activating some caveman instinct for banding together to beat back the beasts and the darkness. (Outside, don't forget, is Washington, D.C., with no shortage of either.)It's no secret that the once sacrosanct categories of High and Low were long ago cast to the wind, leaving rarefied experiential dining on the top end, super-casual eating on the low, and a great, often muddled middle. It sometimes feels as though the real restaurant divide is between Big and Small. If I may vent for a moment about a great American food city that I find myself liking less and less to eat in, what is the matter with Chicago? How can a city known for amazing architecture and amazing neighborhoods center so much of its dining energy in the West Loop, where every “concept” in every oversize industrial space looks like a multi-million-dollar version of Top Chef's Restaurant Wars—cavernous, soulless, hastily assembled, and destined to be gone by next season.What a relief, then, to land at 24-seat Kitsune, far from the Loop, in North Center. This is the idiosyncratic restaurant of chef Iliana Regan, who became a champion of midwestern foraging and terroir at her first restaurant, Elizabeth. Here she applies those principles to Japanese cooking: delicate, wobbly chawanmushi swimming with bits of clam, marinated roe, and bacon; or ramen noodles made with ramps. This isn't gimmicky, or even particularly visible, “fusion,” but quiet, careful, nourishing invention.It's the kind of small, personal, focused place that stood out in this year of chaos, and it was not alone. There are few things I take as a better omen for a meal to come than spotting a baked tarte Tatin sitting near the kitchen pass, waiting to be sliced for dessert. It was one of the first things I saw at Chez Ma Tante, in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and I was not disappointed. The restaurant's name may come from a famous Montreal hot-dog stand, and one of its chefs, Aidan O'Neal, may have cut his teeth at Au Pied de Cochon, the High Temple of Quebecois offal-heads, but I'd say its most Montreal-like quality is a homey sense of great care and little fuss. There are soft slices of pig's-head terrine; grilled skate on the bone with classic sauce ravigote; a pork-shoulder steak, marinated in a mixture of chile, mustard, and maple syrup that imparts just the right level of heat, like an idle bug zapper. The unlikely star is kedgeree—a British colonial mash-up of curried rice and fish, here as fluffy as pilaf and studded with lightly cured cod. New York is filled with alleged “neighborhood restaurants” that are too cool, too experimental, too self-conscious to be the place you return to over and over again, say on a Tuesday night, when it's too late to cook or you want to celebrate a minor victory. If I lived near Chez Ma Tante, it would be my spot for just those days.So would Lady of the House, especially on cold Detroit nights when there's fog on the windows, Curtis Mayfield on the stereo, and a full complement of diners crowded elbow to elbow at the bar. Kate Williams's Corktown tavern feels like a midwestern twin of Chez Ma Tante, down to their coolly modern dark-wood interiors. One of my favorite single dishes of the entire year was Lady of the House's “Parisian Ham”—a simple plate of slow-poached French-style ham, shaved thin but in slices that still offer a pleasantly spongy bite. It is served on a plate accompanied by a small dish of butter whipped with Dijon mustard and fermented honey, and it takes you a moment to realize what's missing: There is no bread. You look from the ham to the butter, from the butter to the ham. You glance around: Is this some kind of test? Is there a two-way mirror somewhere? Am I supposed to just…butter the ham?So is rich, oily “shrimp butter,” served in a sardine tin in an allusion to Spanish conservas. After a few glasses of Slovenian wine, my companion, a local, began declaiming that it shouldn't be called butter at all, since the texture of the intensely orange paste is closer to that of uni; I got the feeling this was not a new monologue, but also that Lady of the House is that kind of place: where everybody knows your name and your personal pedantic demons. (Mine would be that the “Corn Dog Rillette” is really a rillette corn dog, but never mind.) There are fat slabs of pink prime rib coming out of the kitchen, but also dishes that treat plants as equal objects of lust, like cauliflower glazed with a fennel-olive marmalade and served with Parmesan sauce. On the way to the bathroom, you pass a wall covered with the staff's childhood photos. They seem to sum up everything about this happy, occasionally awkward, deeply personal restaurant.It is, of course, a blessing of our era that personal and neighborhoody hardly has to mean unambitious. That was reconfirmed for me when I sat at one of the counter seats at Houston's Theodore Rex. This is Justin Yu's re-invention of his much loved tasting-menu restaurant, Oxheart, and it reflects the easy, happy feel of a chef released from the obligation of making all his customers' decisions for them. Leon Bridges and Sam Cooke croon from the speakers; the napkins resemble terry-cloth dish towels. The food, meanwhile, is as careful and precise as the surroundings are casual: Pristine Gulf citrus is the ostensible star of a grapefruit salad, but I found myself fixated instead on the warm thin-sliced snap peas scattered across the ruby segments, an inspiration Yu says he got from an old Alain Passard pairing; tasted alone, they were sweet as sugar but, somehow, bites with grapefruit brought out a totally different set of peppery, almost horseradish notes, the way orange juice changes utterly if you've just brushed your teeth. A simple bowl of Carolina Gold rice and butter beans revealed itself as not so simple, its flavors shifting as lemon zest gave way to pepper on the way to the bottom. Steamed snapper in a smoked fumet broth thickened with spinach pistou and filled with rustically cut mirepoix managed to evoke China, France, and Texas simultaneously. I would have been happy to let Yu design my dinner; perhaps I wouldn't have ended up with three dishes that had soupy bases. But until he returns to tasting menus, I'll focus instead on his simple Paris-Brest: two rings of pâte à choux sandwiching a pillow of barnyardy Swiss-cheese pastry cream and burnt honey. I crave it more than any other dessert I ate this year.The Charter Oak, St. Helena, CA: High and low, casual and fancy: All mix delightfully by the light of a blazing hearth in the heart of the Napa Valley.Chez Ma Tante, Brooklyn: A little bit Montreal, a little bit France, this Greenpoint corner outpost is at its core all Brooklyn.Cote, New York City: The happy collision of American and Korean steak-house traditions makes for a raucous and delicious night in N.Y.C.Dialogue, Santa Monica: This tiny tasting-menu joint, tucked into a food court, is a revelation about the possibilities of dinner as storytelling.Hello, Sailor, Cornelius, NC: This midcentury-modern haven features expert cocktails and fine-tuned southern classics.Henrietta Red, Nashville: Pristine oysters and deftly cooked seafood are the anchor of Julia Sullivan's cool and comfortable joint.JuneBaby, Seattle: Southern food has rarely tasted as vital as it does under Edouardo Jordan's hand—way, way above the Mason-Dixon Line.Kitsune, Chicago: “Fusion” isn't a dirty word when it's as delicate as this mash-up of Japanese cooking and midwestern bounty.Lady of the House, Detroit: From the comfy bar to the buttered Parisian ham, Kate Williams has created a neighborhood restaurant to dream of.Majordōmo, Los Angeles: Chang's first West Coast outpost is everything you love about Momofuku, plus everything he loves about L.A.Maydān, Washington, D.C.: Gather around the blazing indoor fire for meats, meze, and other Middle Eastern eats at this literal D.C. hot spot.Theodore Rex, Houston: Justin Yu's latest—delayed by Hurricane Harvey—is an ambitious and welcome successor to his beloved Oxheart.Xochi, Houston: The breadth and depth of Oaxacan cooking is on magnificent display at this slick H-Town jewel from Hugo Ortega.Mind you, big, slick, and ripe for replication can have its charms, too. The concept at New York's Cote is the marriage of American steak with Korean barbecue—the natural and brilliant extension of how accustomed we've become to good beef and how deeply Korean flavors have become entrenched in the American palate. On the relatively modestly priced “Butcher's Feast,” you get pieces of hanger steak, 45-day-aged rib eye, and intensely marbled Wagyu flatiron before ending with slices of more traditionally marinated short rib, or kalbi, scored so that they curl and char on the grill like hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. That grill is located in the center of the table, equipped with a venting system that sucks fumes away through subterranean ducts. In the era of the all-powerful big-name chef, every member of the front of house does the cooking here—fairly leaping over one another to tend to the beef as it curls and spits on the grill before you.The table technology plays an important role, eliminating the need for venting hoods over each table and thus leaving space for such dinner niceties as eye contact and toasting. So does the fact that you end up eating a satisfying but relatively small amount of beef compared with an American steak house, while the acid of the accompanying *banchan—*kimchi, bright green scallions dressed in gochujang vinaigrette, the fermented-bean-paste condiment called ssamjang—further diffuses the impact of the beef's richness. If all this results in a room that gets a little giddy and deafening, it's also incentive to order another bottle of soju and, rather than seek a solution, become part of the problem.Likewise, the highest levels of cooking can thrive in the most sterile nooks. Xochi, Hugo Ortega's Oaxacan restaurant, tucked into a glass-sheathed corner of a soaring Marriott Marquis in downtown Houston, has all the appearances of a safe, unchallenging haven for corporate retreaters and badge-wearing convention-goers. Then you get a taste of its mole. Moles, actually—there are at least eight of them on any given night, a range as wide and varied as a rainbow. Fifteen dollars gets you a sample of four, accompanied by fresh corn tortillas, but there's nothing to say you can't double up and get the whole spectrum, spread out before you like a vibraphone: Here are the bright, clear notes of the amarillo; you'll taste it again later, ringing clearly alongside the brininess of wood-roasted oysters; next, the dusky middle tones of red coloradito and murky chicatana, which is made with ants; finally the deep, burnt bass notes of chilhuacle and chinchillo. That last one, too, will make an appearance later, on beef decorating the wide, flat, and crackling street tortillas, called tlayudas, that are served at lunch. Ortega, whose 16-year-old restaurant, Hugo's, helped revolutionize Houston's Mexican dining scene, introduces a whole world of Oaxacan tastes here. The sopa de piedra, a fish-and-shrimp stew served bubbling furiously from the last-second addition of blisteringly hot river stones, is a deep, orange blast of seafood flavor. A pool of blue-corn cream brings soft, earthy notes to a dessert of corn ice cream sculpted into tiny cobs. But it's those multidimensional moles I keep returning to. “All those famous French sauces?” my enthusiastic companion raved. “These kick all of their asses.” It was hard for me to disagree.And sometimes you just want to embrace the chaos. Witness The Charter Oak, in St. Helena, California, in the middle of the Napa Valley. This is theoretically the casual counterpart to Christopher Kostow and Nathaniel Dorn's three-Michelin-star Restaurant at Meadowood, just up the road. In fact, it's a riot of conflicting signs: The hosts wear blazers; the servers, butcher's aprons; and, for no discernible reason, the chefs, Secret Service earpieces. Cocktails come in pre-batched flasks and punch bowls for the table; water, in curvy pewter-and-glass jugs appropriate for bathing Muses on Greek urns; dessert on a modern butcher-block dessert cart.Does any of it matter? Not in the least. There are some restaurants where you get the feeling that everybody is at least momentarily aware of how lucky they are to be there, and this is one. When you enter the bank-like dining room, you're faced with a massive hearth—a place my server pronounced so that it rhymed with “earth.” Off the flames come thick pieces of sourdough, made with a 25-year-old starter, kissed with smoke and delicious with slices of homemade mortadella. “Tostones” are smashed potatoes, deep-fried and tossed with honey, vinegar, sea salt, and seaweed brown butter. These are potato skins, to be clear, and utterly impossible to stop eating. A luscious beef rib is smoked over the wood from Cabernet barrels and comes alongside blistered beets dressed in rendered aged-beef fat. The dessert cart came by, and the chef pushing it cracked a dome of meringue for a Pavlova with a sharp thwack of her spoon. We perused the whiskey menu, deciding to pass on a $240 shot of Orphan Barrel bourbon.None of it made any sense, but at that moment it was also hard to imagine having more fun. In 2018, would it surprise anyone to learn that the great American style might just be incoherence?Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.This story originally appeared in the May 2018 issue with the title "The Perfect Night Out: GQ's Best New Restaurants 2018"

https://www.gq.com/story/best-new-restaurants-2018

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[canaryatlaw]

SO. today was pretty damn awesome. I woke up at like, 8:52, 8 minutes before my alarm was going to go off, and got up to start getting ready for our fun con day. We soon discovered that Jess had not in fact brought a black wig for my Nora Darhk cosplay like she said she was going to (she’s not gonna read this so I’m just gonna shade her a bit here) so we decided to make a quick trip to party city before going to the con. We finished getting ready and ate some of the breakfast the airbnb people made for us (so cute) and Jess wouldn’t crack the stupid hard boiled egg open so I had to crack it for her (I just dropped it like 4 inches onto the table) and then crack my own lol and I was amused. So we ubered to the party city and quickly picked up a shitty black wig that was appropriately named “witch wig” (because Nora’s basically a witch) and it was the closest look to the crappy wig they had in the episode. I like, wasn’t even mad because the episode wig was so crappy anyway it was probably more authentic than anything else, lol. so we got the wig and then took another uber (so many fucking ubers) to the con site. Brandon and Courtney hadn’t arrived yet so we waited in Brandon’s line and said hi to him, took selfies and got autographs, then jumped over to Courtney’s. This was her first like, actual con experience and omg, you guys, she’s so adorable and nice and just amazing. She wanted pictures of Jess and I in cosplay on her phone so she could have them which is just like WHAT so that was pretty damn awesome. After that we went outside to meet up with two friends who were driving up from Miami to meet up with us. So we waited for them to find their way over to where we were (it’s kind of a big complex with a lot of parking and shit) and we gave them our wristbands from yesterday since we have the VIP ones from the movie last night, so they didn’t have to pay for entry, lol. Their VIP system for like, lines and shit, instead of having a separate line like HVFF does, they like, stagger the VIP people in between the regular people which is like, SUPER AWKWARD lol but I guess it works. There were people there from the local CW affiliate with a bunch of swag they were giving away, posters and t shirts and all this cool stuff, so we definitely got some of that. We looked around a bit and saw Brandon and Courtney were otherwise occupied, so the friends bought a photo op for later on, and we went outside to get some lunch. I ended up getting a cheese panini of some sort that was like one of the only things on the menu that wasn’t fried, and a watermelon shaved ice. We went back inside around 1:30 to wait for the Courtney and Brandon panel at 2 for legends. I live tweeted pretty much the entire thing in one big thread if you’re interested in reading that (@RachelEiley on twitter) but yeah it was super cute and they are like the MOST adorable together, like honestly they were so fucking precious and sweet and it was just brilliant. When asked how they sort of got to their roles on the CW Courtney said she had actually auditioned for Laurel back in the day, then they had her read for the part of Vandal Savage’s daughter in season 1, then called her in for Nora because they had liked her as one bad guy’s daughter so they thought they’d try another and it worked lol. She also told a very cute story about how Supernatural shoots right next door to Legends and when she was on Supernatural they’d like, crawl under this hole in the fence and like, get double lunch with each other and cute stuff like that haha it was really just a super fucking cute panel. So when it was over we pretty much headed over to their tables to wait for them. I went to go get some cash out of the ATM to buy a photo op only for it to only let me take out $20, despite confirming I had much more than that in my account, so I called my dad and asked him to call the credit card people to tell them I was in Florida and to let me get money, which he did lol and I was graciously lended money by my friends to buy the photo op, just a single one with Courtney. So we ended up waiting for that and I actually got two shots because the camera guy didn’t like how the first one turned out so now I have two pictures which is awesome with me?? Lol. We had to wait a while for the photos to get printed and everything, so we went back over to the tables and talked to Courtney for a bit which was super cool. We got the photos and then spent a while actually looking through the vendors and the artists alley which had some cool stuff. After that we headed out and had some debate over where to go for dinner, but winded up deciding on the cheesecake factory. it looked super crowded, as it always is, but we only ended up having to wait like 20 minutes so it wasn’t bad. we got to sit outside which was nice because it was a good temperate out. Dinner was nice, I got the pasta there I really like, then I got a shot glass full of ice cream with a candle in it to celebrate my birthday and they had everyone sing haha it was all very good. We were all stuffed so we got cheesecake to go. Once we left it became apparent that two of our passengers desperately needed to go to the bathroom and had failed to do so before we left, so we ended up stopping at a hobby lobby of all places to use the bathroom lol and I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually been inside one of them before, so that was cool, and of course I made them do a quick version of the “hobby lobby photo challenge” that’s been floating around and is all too hilarious. From there we drove back to our airbnb and said goodbye to our friends. Then we basically just sat and chilled out for the rest of the night because we were tired, Jess wrote some fic and I edited some fic for her, and it was all good, then we started getting ready for bed and it’s late again so I should be getting to sleep by now. I have to wake up at 5:15 am to check into our flight for Monday morning which takes off at 5:15 am (which is gonna SUCK) but then go back to sleep thankfully. We’re doing Sara and Ava tomorrow as sort of a dry run before C2E2 in two weeks, so that will be exciting. And yeah, that’s all I got for now. Today was pretty sweet. Hopefully tomorrow will be as well. Goodnight lovelies. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.

#daily journal #March 2018