The egg tart is perhaps not as lionized as the soup dumpling, but it can be just as much the subject of fantasy. Praises have been sung. Lists have been compiled. At least one film has been made. A good egg tart – not too sweet, barely savory and held together by a tender, flaky [...]
As it turns out, Heaven on Seven is not the only restaurant in Chicago’s Downtown Loop to nest in the upper floors of an office building. During my visit to the Loop I spotted at least one other in-office restaurant serving those who’d just as soon take the elevator for a meal or a pint [...]
Long Island City’s M. Wells, the Quebec-American diner that stole the heartbeats of pretty much every food enthusiast in New York when it opened in 2010, did so by offering a playful, gourmet spin on diner fare that’s as accessible as it is intrepid. This is especially true for M. Wells’ brunch menu: dishes tend [...]
Picture a classic Thanksgiving dinner, when an extended family gathers around a mythically long table. Each seat is filled, and each person can look ahead to see a feast atop tablecloth and a close relative or friend. It’s a scene of domesticity and community, something reserved for sit-coms and too-perfect households, rife with interpersonal drama, [...]
In mid-August, my great friend and epic eating comrade Boykji visited New York for a whirlwind tour of the city’s eats. The five days I spent sharing meals with Boyk reminded me of how lucky I am to live in New York, where one can literally spend hours on end walking, eating and repeating without [...]
Four glasses of wine into a perfectly warm Oahu evening, as I finished off my cousin’s barbecued flank steak and extra spicy caesar salad, his girlfriend regaled us with the paragon attributes of Kona peaberry coffee, a speech she learned from one of her employers. That employer is Alan Wong, a man with enough opinions [...]
A few weeks ago I competed alongside three other food bloggers in Japan Society’s Clash of the Foodies. You can now watch the entire program online, beginning with my shitty cartwheel and ending with the Taste Buds taking second place. Our prize, bottles of Zen Green Tea Liqueur, couldn’t have been a better match – [...]
When people hear the word “whole foods,” I think a cloud of buzzwords typically attached to the phrase makes the concept more obtuse than it needs to be. A whole food is simply a natural food that hasn’t been processed, and thinking about it this way makes it a lot easier to incorporate whole foods [...]
When I tell people I’m going home for the holidays, I mean to say two things: 1. I’ve booked a flight to Los Angeles. 2. Once I’m in Los Angeles, I’ll get the Hell out and make tracks for the East Bay. 3. My appetite is expanding to Homeric proportions. I’ll be the first to [...]
This story was expanded from a column that James wrote for the Daily Californian in 2006. I was sitting on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Doe Library for tea one hazy morning in 2005 when a woman carrying a clipboard asked me to spare a moment for her petition. She informed me that the campus [...]
