Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog
Follow the Culinary Ruminations of New Mexico's Sesquipedalian Sybarite. 1,302 Restaurant Reviews, More Than 13,100 Visitor Comments…And Counting!
Is there still a place in the American restaurant scene for hometown mom and pop institutions? According to the Nation’s Restaurant News, a respected trade magazine, almost fifty percent of the 100 largest chains saw flat or declining growth rates in sales in 2006. Those rates are largely attributed to the sheer volume of restaurant…
The Hollywood stereotype of restaurant critics paints them rather unflatteringly as condescending misanthropes to be feared. Those stereotypes would have you believe restaurant critics are eager to pounce on and expose the slightest imperfection. Armed with pedantic palates and polysyllabic vocabularies overflowing with unfavorable adjectives, critics are painted as joyless beings whose quest it is…
Stereotypes would have you believe English food and Mexican food are at the opposite end of the spectrum from one another…as different as day and night. Those stereotypes paint English food as bland and unimaginative while Mexican food is depicted as spirited and exciting. That makes it deliciously ironic that perhaps the foremost authority on…
Every region across the fruited plain seems to have its iconic foods–incomparable dishes that define the area because they’re prepared better in that region than anywhere else. Though there may be many capable practitioners in the preparation of these beloved and celebrated regional favorites, invariably there are restaurants with legitimate claims to superiority–stand-outs which, by…
In describing “food porn,” The New Yorker once wrote, “The point is to get very close to what you are filming, so close that you can see an ingredient’s “pores” which then triggers some kind of Neanderthal reflex. If you’re flicking from channel to channel and come upon food that has been shot in this…
It’s been called the “Harvard of cooking schools” and has been credited with having “changed the way Americans eat” by no less than the James Beard Foundation. World-reknowned French chef Paul Bocuse calls it “the best culinary school in the world.” It has trained more than forty-thousand culinary professionals and counts among its distinguished alumni…
