On broad banana leaves, dishes of sweet soy dipping sauce, a creamy pork liver sauce, a bubbling pinakbet, some sticky rice and a raw salad of slivered bitter melon and red onion flank a crackling lechon like planets orbiting the sun. This is the final savory course of the kamayan dinner, a Filipino family-style meal,…
When Tina and Marvin Pate travel to Cancún or the Dominican Republic, they enjoy the bliss created by the good music, delicious food and the absence of children. So in May, when they opened Bliss Caribbean Restaurant in St. Louis County, Mo., the couple decided to give their customers the same joy — by requiring…
The path to countless speedy meals starts with a few scrambled eggs. Pep them up with spices, cheeses or vegetables, or leave them simple and pure; they might be the fastest breakfast you can make that doesn’t come out of a box. And I like them even better for dinner. No matter the time of…
In John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” there’s a scene in which a father asks a second-grade teacher, at parents’ night, why the art her students make is so especially brilliant. “Look at the first grade,” he says to her. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second…
To make a stodgy cake is human. To soak that cake in sweet milk is divine. The long and sometimes boozy history of soaked cakes is a varied and delightful category of the human baking experience. For reasons from old bread to stale pastry to clumsy baking, we have learned, with time and ingenuity, to…
Chefs tend to load their first restaurants with every hope, dream, vision and idea they’ve ever had. It may not all come together, but if it comes close and if the ideas are any good, we can respond to the originality and overlook the weak spots. That was my reaction to Claud, which the chef…
Tell me honestly: Are you ever excited to have a green salad for dinner? Generally speaking, I’m not, though there was a recent exception. It was an iron-hot afternoon and I was planning for dinner. I had all the ingredients to make one of my favorite salad dressings, green goddess. I could easily stop by…
On Kiva Williams’s Juneteenth table, pops of red — barbecue ribs and watermelon, a symbol of freedom — share the table with hot dogs, burgers, potato salad and baked beans. Sometimes, foods from her past, like fried fish and spaghetti, and coleslaw, “my favorite meal from back home” in Tennessee, also make an appearance. For…
Opening Bánh by Lauren The pastry chef Lauren Tran has put down roots in an airy corner bakery and cafe in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. She had baked at Gramercy Tavern until the pandemic, then began selling bánh (a general term in Vietnamese for cake) from home and at pop-ups. Now she’s turning…
In Lockhart, a small city just south of Austin, Texas, barbecue is still the feast of choice. Anywhere friends and family meet, butcher paper unfurls to reveal a mosaic of smoked meats and pickled jalapeños, juicy links of sausage that snap into a savory crumble, nestled between foam cups of potato salad, frijoles and baked…