Category: Reviews

EMPEROR’S GARDEN SZECHWAN

Does anyone but me remember the Szechwan/Hunan cooking craze of the late ’70’s and early ’80’s?

About the time boomers were emerging from their adolescent shells enough to pay attention to the world, a number cookbooks were published on the subject, inspired, in part by the success of Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan restaurant in New York City. The original Uncle Tai’s closed long ago, but the restaurant ignited the hot Asian food craze in America, and was responsible (at least for a time) for weaning us off of the bland, cornstarch-ridden, gloppy Cantonese food that had been innundating America for fifty years or so.

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An Italian Lesson At LUPO

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again. – George Miller

The above cliche is based upon the bad, cheap, fat-laden Italian food that continues to enthrall the American middle class (see Olive Garden, Maggiano’s, Macaroni Grill et al). It’s too bad though, because true Italian food, like Japanese, is about ingredients (or good groceries, as Alan Richman says) more than technique. For pirouettes on the plate, one usually looks to China or France, but for pristine ingredients that shine with only a minor flourish or two, you can’t beat a purist Italian meal prepared by a great chef.

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BAZIC FUSION RESTAURANT

This is the sort of place where middle-aged, white guys in business suits elicit lots of “what’s a round-eye like you doing in here?” befuddlement from the staff when they walk in. After they stop staring (because you’re the first middle-age white guy in a suit ever to appear in the place), that staff then tries to talk you out of ordering anything good — assuming that being lost and starving are the only things that could’ve gotten you there.

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