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!
“La Risa es el mejor remedio.” (Laughter is the best medicine.) Laughter is a mystery. Scientists don’t know why among all creatures throughout the Earth, only humans are hard-wired to be able to laugh. Not even the hyena has this capability. What scientists do know is that laughter has a variety of benefits to…
Despite my (then) near eidetic memory and a sesquipedalian lexicon, it was my bumpkinly naivete my friends in Boston found most surprising (and amusing) about me. By having absorbed Encyclopedia Britannica (before the internet and Wikipedia were a twinkle in Al Gore’s eyes), I had as much or more “book knowledge” about Boston as any…
“Forget what you thought you knew about Mexican food!” That should be a cardinal rule for unacculturated diners when traveling to Mexico–or visiting Mariscos Altamar–for the first time. Many of the dishes some Americans commonly believe typify Mexican cooking are either not Mexican at all (chimichangas and fajitas, for example), or are prepared using inauthentic…
My friend Carrie Seidman, the elegant and erstwhile restaurant critic for the Albuquerque Tribune prefaced one restaurant review by saying “sometimes pleasure comes with a price tag.” That pithy aphorism should probably be appended by paraphrasing Luke 12:48: “from those who charge a lot, much will be expected.” Expensive meals come with expectations of intoxicating…
In the 1978 movie Same Time Next Year, Ellen Burstyn’s character lamented that her husband considered his years in the Army the best years of his life. When Alan Alda’s character, her partner in a 26-year adulterous affair, commiserated that many men felt that way about their time in the military, Burstyn retorted, “but he…
Returning to the United States in 1985 after my first year in England, there were two things that surprised me. The first was the difficulty of getting used to driving on the “Yank” side of the road again. Driving on the “wrong” side had required a high state of alertness and conscious thought until it…
A few years ago when France was the target of xenophobic sentiment and some political commentators even advocated boycotting all things French, my vivacious friend Janet Resnik remained a fervent Francophile. With the simple retort, “ah, but the food,” she found it easy to diffuse dour diatribes in which not a single good thing was…
In 1520, after sailing past South America’s Tierra del Fuego and through a perilous strait which he named for himself, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan laid eyes on the expansive South Sea. At the time, the waters were calm and peaceful. He renamed it the Pacific Ocean (from the Latin Mare Pacificum which means “peaceful sea.”)…
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare Certainly as a lexicologist, the Bard of Avon should know darned well that what something is named does matter…or maybe not so much. In Waco, Texas, a burger joint has eschewed politically correctness by…
