Good morning. I’d wager I cook more than your average newspaper editor. I enjoy feeding my family and appreciate the break it offers me from thinking about facts and figures, stories and consequences. But, man, Wednesdays are difficult. The weekends seem so far away. There was the last one, already remembered in sepia tones, when…
At the Jerk Cafe, a storefront tucked into a strip mall in the Cape Cod village of South Yarmouth, Mass., sweet-smelling smoke greets guests as soon as they open the front door. So does the cafe’s proprietor, Glenroy Burke, who bounces around the wide-open kitchen stirring pots, tending the grill and plating dishes. “I don’t…
A good biscuit is a miracle. Its own holy ritual and a hangover cure-all. No matter how foolproof your recipe may be, or how many generations have passed it down, the moment a biscuit departs an oven follows a familiar pattern: expectation, followed by suspense, before the elation payoff. Success is immediately recognizable, weightless in…
When Heba Abo Elkheir was a little girl, she dreamed of becoming a lawyer, maybe even a judge. After earning a bachelor’s degree in law in her native Egypt, she married and soon found herself a mother of two. “Then everything stopped,” she said. “I didn’t want to just sit at home, but it was…
Before I hop into the questions, a special thanks to my colleague Becky Hughes for filling in last week. I feel well rested and energized to answer another round of reader questions. Today we have a newbie looking to try different cuisines, a visitor seeking great Cantonese and a diner who wants to eat in…
There’s no end of bagel stores across New York but for bialys, one name stands out: Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys. It’s been a fixture on the Lower East Side since 1936, first as Mirsky and Kossar’s Bakery, then, as of 1953, just Kossar’s. Now the company is branching into other neighborhoods, first with a store…
Naâma Laufer and Luis Correia, who import wines from Mr. Correia’s native Portugal, started a second company, My Portuguese Market, last year, selling handcrafted goods from Portugal. They have just introduced a lemon- and sea salt-scented, sardine-shaped soap on a rough cord. It’s ideal for hands that have been working with seafood, garlic and onions,…
In early spring, Jake Dickson of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats created a salumi bar at his Chelsea Market store using locally raised meats. The specialties available on their site now include jerky for the trail and salami for picnics, or summer snacking. The company makes 10 or so salumi in flavors like tres chiles, cacio e…
Xiao Chi Jie, a Chinese street food restaurant in Seattle owned by Caleb Wang and Jen Liao, turned to frozen takeout when the pandemic began. They specialized in soup dumplings, which they began shipping nationally in late 2020. Now they have introduced shao kao skewers with nicely spiced marinated boneless beef, lamb and chicken to…
Order the banh beo chen at the downtown Vietnamese restaurant Saigon Social and six will show up, arranged in a circle around a dish of seasoned fish sauce. This is as it should be. Like Mormon missionaries, banh beo chen never travel alone. Typically, each of these soft disks of steamed rice flour is the…