Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
John Butterfly's Landed in South Park
What's the address and phone of this place? I live nearby, want to check it out!— October 3, 2011 8:17 p.m.
Contrary to "Wolfie," Pomegranate lives on
Restaurant owners mainly call him Wolfie. When he's soliciting ads, he eats at their restaurants, so they get to know him up close and peronal. Glad to say, after I yelled at his answering machine, he did publish a correction this week.— September 23, 2011 7:18 p.m.
"Sidewalk Chefs" Food Demos
Deb Scott has rescheduled to cook on September 10, not the 24th.— August 24, 2011 6:55 p.m.
Golden Hill's Counterpoint
Thanks for trying out Counterpoint and alerting us in the nabe to the new chef. This is just a couple of blocks from my house, but the previous menu of breads'n'spreads wasn't intereting enough to prompt a try. I've noticed that lately, the room is a lot more crowded, now I know why. (Not a lot else in the heart of Golden Hill.) Might even join them myself one of these days (and glad to hear they have tables to sit at, not just bar stools, which to a runt like me look like elementary school jungle gyms to climb on.) Oh, but to spoil it all -- how did our editors let you spell those mushrooms "shittake" rather than "shiitake?" It looks foul, as well as incorrect. To put it a coarser way, "there's no sh-t in shiitake!"— July 28, 2011 9:26 p.m.
Big Figs in Little Oaks
Have you tried the chicken fried steak at Centre City Cafe in south Escondido? So crisp, oh, yum. But maybe I'm prejudiced. I totally hate the heavy, thick manhole-sized pancake at Potato Shack. Quantity, not quality. Well, to each his own.— July 3, 2011 9:16 p.m.
The Prado's Thursday Night Dinner Package
No, I don't love the Cohns. For years, I thought their restaurants were responsible for the mediocrity of San Diego palates. I got a lot of nasty letters to the editor from the Cohns when I gave their restaurants the lukewarm reviews they deserved. (I finally realized that they were in fact giving San Diegans exactly what they wanted, hence their incredible success.I wish their restaurants' food was better, but this is how it is.) But as to price, I'm a restaurant reviewer. I eat out all the time. I have to live within the Reader's limits on my restaurant expenses, so I look closely at what I spend. I'm not Tin Fork, I'm supposed to cover middle and upper-price restaurants, too, within those limits. Given 11 years of this experience, I consider anything $40 and under a bargain for a moderate-price restaurant. The typical moderate price is $50 per person plus tip and tax. And you usually don't get museum tickets as part of your meal. I did screw up here, though. At some ungodly hour of the night, I copied the Cohn's copy to the blog (mea culpa! mea culpa!) instead of rewording it from "our" to "their." I am heartily sorry and will try to do better in the future by not posting when I'm ready for bed.— July 3, 2011 8:59 p.m.
Chipotle Growing Even More Local
Responding to Visduh -- Much of the beef at Chipotle is from Niman Ranch, which sort of straddles the line between small biz and agribiz. It started out as a tiny Northern California purveyor of hormone-free beef, called Niman-Schell, that actually came from one ranch. (As I recall, it was somewhere around Bolinas or Point Reyes, heartlands of aggie-hippieland.) As a San Franciscan during those years, I'd buy it whenever I found it, since the quality difference between that and supermarket beef (especially ground beef) was obvious to the palate. It rarely showed up in supermarkets, however, because many of the best local restaurants (e.g., Zuni, Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley) were glomming it all up. Eventually Orville Schell pulled out and Niman (whose first name I've never learned) went on to expand, on a nationwide "co-op" profit-sharing model, buying only beef from ranchers who agreed to meet much higher quality and humaneness standards than, say, the skinny Brazilian cows feeding McD's customers. You'll find Niman beef (at much higher prices than at Chipotle!) in many of the top restaurants in town, particularly in "chef" hamburgers. The carne asado burrito I ate there (and reviewed six years ago) was the closest approximation I'd found here to the superb carne asado burritos at La Cumbre in San Francisco -- a tiny taqueria, also with no service, where you'd follow your order along the counter specifying what you wanted and didn't want in your burrito (no rice in mine), and then pay at the register and take it to your table. There, as at Chipotle, one burrito fed two moderate appetites. (La Cumbre's fresh-made carne asado was a little tastier, but hey, in SD, you make do with what you've got.) And nobody's forcing people to eat huge burritos all in one sitting. Patrons can also specify what they want or don't want in the burrito and in everything else. Chipotle's menu is varied and includes smaller items -- and huge salads. That is to say, if people want to eat vast quantities of foods that make them obese, it's not necessarily the eatery's fault for serving the supersize portions that Americans crave and demand. And maybe the incrased freshness of local veggies will entice more people to order the salads. (As for the beans and the tortilla flour -- well, who the hell knows where any of that comes from? For home cooking, unless you spend a fortune on them at a health food store or Whole Foods-- and maybe not even then--not a clue! And if the oil is the ever-popular canola -- we do know. Comes from huge agribiz, drenching the fields with Monsanto weed-killer on the acres of -- wha? -- rape stalks.)— July 3, 2011 8:33 p.m.
Gatorburger: Chicken, with Attitude?
Yeah, the ostrich burger is terrific, for ostrich. (There's a reason its fad was so short-lived: Yeah, it's healthy, but it's also the leanest, dryest meat you ever did chaw.) What I love about Crazee Burger is that the owners are actually European-trained chefs, not short-order guys, so for each meat they make a special marinade, mix or sauce. They make the only turkey burger I can stand. And yes, even their ostrich is good, too. (But alligator is hard to tame, white-white meat as lean as ostrich!) When Crazee first opened, they hoped to include rattlesnake burgers, but the local gummint nixed it because rattlers are supposedly endanagered (my friends in more rural areas would very much beg to differ!) -- even though these snakes came from a huge snake farm/butcher in Nevada. I've eaten rattler meat and it's pretty good; I'm sorry I can't have a nice boneless version in a burger, 'cause when you cook it yourself it's strictly finger food to suck off the many bones. The line out the door is probably not due to EdBed's post. It's a great place, and the neighborhood is on to it.— June 30, 2011 6:59 p.m.
Frankie the Bull at Proud Mary's
Just after this article went into its final edit, I learned that Bud's has actually just moved from Tierrasanta to -- Kearny Mesa. (See blogs for the address).— June 9, 2011 5:22 p.m.
Pink Pork — and Cleaning Meat the Caribbean Way
Oh, forgot to say about that lemon or lime rub -- it's not just for meat you buy that's already old, it's also for meat you buy fresher and then you con't get around to cooking it for a few days, and now the surface is all wet and goopy.— May 31, 2011 9:25 p.m.