Ann Lemons Pollack
-
On Anonymity
There’s been some fuss in the national press and among bloggers about restaurant critics’ anonymity being blown after LA critic Jonathan Gold won the Pulitzer Prize last spring. Much argument on this. Many people, both critics and non-, feel it’s essential. Mimi Sheraton, former restaurant critic for the New York Times, is strongly in this
-
This Week’s Wine September 15, 2007
The Norton Festival held Sept. 8 at the Missouri History Museum was a fine event, and its success presages even better times ahead for subsequent years, and I hope that more festivals are planned. More than 1000 people showed up on a rainy day (a good day for indoor activities, like wine-tasting) to sample the
-
Sage
It’s difficult to write about Sage without referring to the restaurant that originally occupied its site. The Lynch Street Bistro was strikingly handsome and, in its early life, a very good restaurant. But for too long, it languished. Now, however, it looks as if good things are happening again. The delightful staircase to the second
-
Books: My Bombay Kitchen
About a thousand years ago, the group of people known as Parsis emigrated from what is now Iran to India. None of their descendants have opened restaurants in St. Louis. To judge from My Bombay Kitchen, a new cookbook from Miloufer Ichaporia King, that’s a real shame. King lives in the Bay Area and has
-
This Week’s Wine September 4, 2007
Lucian Dressel made a major contribution to the Missouri wine industry in the last half of the Twentieth Century, and now he’s working in the same direction in Illinois. He’s the general manager and winemaker at little Mary Michelle Winery, in Carrollton, Ill., some 50 miles north of St. Louis on U.S. Highway 67, and
-
Thai Fried Rice
For some reason, I find myself making this on Saturday evenings. Maybe that’s because there are apt to be leftovers (like rice) from the week, and a trip to Bob’s seafood that morning. It’s very light and refreshing compared to the fried rice that comes tightly packed into one of those little handled carry-out containers.
-
Cozy Dog Drive In
No question about it: This is indeed the corn dog season, with end-of-summer fairs and festivals in full swing. So it seemed more than appropriate to take a road trip and visit the birthplace of the corn dog. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t know that when we walked into the Cozy Dog Drive In.
-
Iowa State Fair
We were in Des Moines a couple of weeks ago. We went there to learn about soy beans, and some of our newly acquired knowledge will be discussed in this space shortly. But the Iowa State Fair, the mythic grand-daddy of all state fairs, was in progress, so we spent a couple of days there.
-
This Week’s Wine August 22, 2007
Winning the Missouri lottery may involve beating very high odds, but winning a medal in the Missouri wine competition has sadly become not very much of a feat – the recent State Fair competition awarded medals to 76 percent of entries, or 197 medals out of 258 entries. That means the bar is very low,
-
New York: Babbo
A recent weekend run to New York to accompany an old friend on her first visit to Gotham produced one particularly remarkable meal at a spot we haven’t written about before. We also ate at Veselka and Jing Fong; earlier comments can be found here . Babbo is on Waverly Place, just west of Washington