Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog
Follow the Culinary Ruminations of New Mexico's Sesquipedalian Sybarite. 1191 Restaurant Reviews, More Than 11,500 Visitor Comments…And Counting!
From Norbert, the Norwegian Ridgeback of Harry Potter lore to Smaug, the greatest and most powerful of all dragons in The Hobbit, dragons are a familiar icon in modern literature, movies, music and pop culture. …
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Back in the 1960s before the world was “woke” a catchy television jingle painted a pretty bleak picture: “Aunt Jemima pancakes without her syrup. It’s like the spring without the fall. There’s only one thing …
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“I hate it. I think it’s an abomination. There are so many awesome things here, I don’t know why that should be featured. It’s leading with your weakness. So much other great stuff.” ~Anthony Bourdain …
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Once a year, despite my protestations and whining, I agree to take my Kim to the Olive Garden. It’s a deal we have, albeit one that makes me feel like Faust in the Christopher Marlowe …
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My brother in blogging Ryan Cook describes his first day in Vietnam: “So, my first stop in Vietnam was the capital, Hanoi. My honest first impressions… what the hell have I let myself in for. …
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Restaurant Insider, which touts itself as “your source for restaurant news, trends, information, tools and conversation” has observed that one of the catalysts most instrumental in driving a changing culinary landscape are Generation Z (anyone …
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Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern has nothing on my friend Ralph Guariglio. Zimmern who claims to love such “exotic cuisine” as fermented walrus anus probably wouldn’t touch some of the…er, interesting foods Ralph enjoyed during …
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Slovenian cuisine in Colorado. Burmese cuisine in Indiana. Sri Lankan cuisine in Kentucky. Who da thunk it? The Land of E Pluribus Unum is truly “one from many,” an aggregate of cultures. Conde Naste Traveler …
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In 1972, English author Diana Kennedy, the doyenne of Mexican cuisine, penned The Cuisines of Mexico, a Mexican cookbook in which she described Texas’s Mexican food as “inauthentic,” coining the term “Tex-Mex.” Kennedy essentially drew …
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Observer: You’ve said that you can do anything with a taco, except put ketchup on it? Danny Trejo: That’s it! [Laughs]. Observer: Do people try to do that? Danny Trejo: Yeah, some people think that …
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Until Dagmar Mondragon launched her first German restaurant in Albuquerque back in 1996, many of us knew very little about German cuisine in general and baking in particular. The only German baker with which some …
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Never mind your tired, your poor or even your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Carlos Zazveta, the effusive proprietor of Sharky’s Fish & Seafood told us to bring our dogs, our cows and our …
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You might think that the food truck industry is an ultra-competitive dog-eat-dog business in which purveyors aren’t very gracious when discussing fellow food truck operators. Considering how they often jockey for a limited number of …
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Thank you, Mighty Mike! Thank you for restoring our faith in barbecue just one day after my Kim declared “I don’t want to have barbecue for a long time.” Readers might find it hard to …
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“A tortilla can be the, I would say, the most meaningful, the symbol of the Mexican cuisine, it’s the heart of the Mexican cuisine, the soul … the most recognizable element of the Mexican cuisine.” …
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Urban Dictionary, that oft hilarious, veritable cornucopia of slang, jargon and streetwise lingo, defines “lush” as “someone who drinks a lot.” (Actually, there are several pages of similar definitions for “lush” in the “peoples’ dictionary,” …
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Drive eastward on Airport Road in Santa Fe toward Cerrillos and you just might wonder if you accidentally traipsed into the Twilight Zone and somehow found yourself in Los Angeles. At the very least, you …
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A case could be made that “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” the name of a 1977 hit by Santa Esmeralda, could well be a lament about New Mexican cuisine (in addition to being the background …
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“Now you’re just being uppity.” That’s my Kim putting me in my place the second I begin to crow haughtily about some highbrow or nouveau way to prepare something ordinary. Tandoori salmon pizza…that’s so me. …
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“I am tenacious. And I love to eat. I go into the field and see some delectable things they’re cooking, wild plants perhaps, and think, ‘Oh my God, I have to write about this.’ I …
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“Fly once more like you did before, Sing a new song chicken tikka!” ~Chiquitita Misheard Lyrics You might think by virtue of my name and then gangling gait, school mates at St. Anthony’s in Penasco …
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in February, 2020, Chef’s Pencil crunched the numbers of Google searches for ethnic cuisines to determine the most popular ethnic cuisines in America. The two most popular ethnic cuisines were deemed to be Mexican and …
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Genius, it’s oft been said, is ninety-nine-percent perspiration and one-percent inspiration. Apply that equation to Bob Yacone and you’d be selling him far short. So would the cliche “giving one-hundred-percent.” Add a few more hundred …
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About halfway between Truth or Consequences and Hatch on I-25, you may have espied a billboard audaciously proclaiming “world’s finest green chile cheeseburger.” That billboard has always piqued my curiosity and prompted such questions as …
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“To witness the birth of a noodle is a glorious thing. I have listened, spellbound, as an 85-year-old noodle chef in Beijing told me why the act of making noodles helped him make sense of …
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Archaeologists believe there’s a scientific explanation for contemporary humankind’s predilection for seaside vacations and trips to the beach. Evidence–stone tools used to cut through animal flesh–seems to support the theory that the first humans migrated …
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Here’s an interesting bit of Jeopardy level trivia which you might contemplate the next time you dine at this Rio Rancho spot: In the Spanish golden age, a “cazuela” was the gallery located above the …
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When my corporate group had its employees, a high-performing contingent of information technology professionals, take a strengths assessment, the results were contrary to the stereotypes often painted about techno-geeks. None of us, for example, were …
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If you’ve noticed an almost inordinate number of recent visits on this blog to Mexican restaurants, credit much of that to Pati Jinich, ebullient host of the James Beard Award-winning and Emmy nominated PBS series …
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if you believe the idea for delivery food started with Domino’s Pizza and its promise of 30-minute delivery or free, you’d be sadly mistaken. Nor did take-out originate with Chinese restaurants in California and their …
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Darn that Google! Even though I used very specific Boolean operands to target my search for “Changos” in “Albuquerque,” Google returned results for Changos in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico. It wasn’t until studying the photos for …
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“Of the seven deadly sins, lust is definitely the pick of the litter.” ~Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All “Why,” my Kim wondered aloud “would a food truck call itself Sopaipilla Lust.” Obviously reflecting on …
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“Are you going to explain how to pronounce “bosque?,” my Kim asked when she espied me working on this review. Though her Spanish vocabulary is rather limited, she pronounces the five or six hundred Spanish …
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In retrospect, the monsters and bogeymen who frightened impressionable children of my generation were pretty lame. Perhaps the most lame of them all was Frankenstein, a lumbering behemoth who walked around with his arms outstretched …
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Céad míle fáilte, an Irish greeting meaning “a hundred thousand welcomes” preempts any menu listings at O’Hare’s Grille & Pub. At times, especially during happy hour and before Covid, it seemed a hundred thousand patrons …
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In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld fittingly titled “The Switch” Jerry asked his devious friend George Costanza how he could switch from dating Sandy, a dour woman who didn’t laugh to dating her roommate Laura, …
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