Umami Mart

In my hood, the chic São Paulo bairro of Jardins, I share sidewalks with a rather large group of Hasidic Jews. All of the beards make me feel like I’m safe and at home. They are the unspoken guardians of Jardins, as I have heard rumors of their n0-nonsense approach to local crime and robberies. […]

I know this piece of cake doesn’t look so hot, but to be fair, it’s been through a lot. Last weekend I was at a house party in Williamsburg. It was still Passover, so I was having wine instead of beer, cheese with no crackers and trying not to look at the cookies. I’d been […]

Around the corner from the dimly-lit, time machine-esque Smoke House is Bob’s Big Boy. This is where tourists and locals go to eat high-calorie meals under bright fluorescent lights, without caring who’s watching them–and no one is. The polite waitstaff is there to do the job they are paid to do: routinely and repeatedly check […]

If you are not convinced that beer pairings work with upscale dining, this post may change your mind. Recently I attended an amazing event put on by Stag Dining Group who partnered with Magnolia Brewery to create The Brewmasters Dinner. Stag Dining Group puts on communal dinners while partnering with vineyards, hunters, musicians–this time they […]

In Junichiro Tanizaki’s celebrated novel, The Makioka Sisters (or Sasameyuki (細雪), loosely translated as ‘light snow’ or ‘a flurry of snow’–titles in translations are always so different but I guess it’s as much about nuance as meaning), the four Makioka sisters, Tsuruko, Sachiko, Yukiko and Taeko, all born and bred in Osaka, take a trip […]

Seeing an old friend after some time is like nothing else. You catch up, see how they are doing, and talk about old times. I made my way to Okinawa a while back to check old the old island and made it my first priority to see Daisuke and his newly opened pizzeria, Bacar. I […]

I am finally back. Although the past couple of weeks have been super hectic, I had the opportunity to go to my favorite restaurant Kajitsu, twice in two weeks. At the end of March, my work held a special dinner gathering there, and I wasn’t planning on going, but at the last moment I got […]

I was recently in my hometown of Santa Rosa (Sonoma County, CA) and a bit of a buzz has started about a gathering of food trucks on Monday afternoons in one parking lot in town. Serving fare from their adorable airstream trailer, Dim Sum Charlie’s had the longest line by far- which of course we […]

The Smoke House is the sort of place where old-timey execs sip their nightcaps as they wait for their retirement (“I gave the best years of my life to this place”) and where awkward co-workers carry on as if they are passing through town for work, treating their affairs as fleeting, one night romances. The […]

I’m so over normality. I’m over generic cafes, mediocre restaurants and bleh bars with all their effortless interiors, lazy service, boring menu offerings and pointless existence besides making money (in these days: little). The next time I walk into a cream coloured cafe serving cafe lattes in a standard glass with a napkin around it, […]