Category: United States

AmericanCaliforniaDog FriendlyUnited States

Workshop Kitchen + Bar – Palm Springs, California

Gil Garduno

“Good restaurant design is about achieving equilibrium between the food, service and design – in effect telling a complete story.” ~ David Rockwell, American Architect Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly commentator on television’s 60 Minutes didn’t like food that’s “too carefully arranged;” declaring “it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking,” adding “If I wanted a picture I’d buy a painting.”  Those of us who write about food not only notice, we enjoy eye-pleasing artful plating, especially when everything is where it should be for optimum harmony, balance and appearance.  We like plate syzygy. The balance of color, texture and appearance gives us pause to reflect on how great everything looks before our taste buds…

CaliforniaDog FriendlySeafoodUnited States

Shanghai Reds at the Fisherman’s Market & Grill – La Quinta, California

Gil Garduno

For years, fish tacos have been one of those popular, almost faddish obsessions which have garnered more attention and affection than cynics like me believe is warranted (much the same way some of us feel about Beyonce and anything Kardashian).  It’s always been well beyond my capability to understand why fish tacos have been so highly regarded.  Sure, my Kim and I have had a number of good to very good fish tacos, but we’ve never had a truly transformative, eye-opening “now I get it” fish taco.  Not even in San Diego.  Certainly not in New Mexico.  Apparently, we’re not the only ones. Legendary gifted raconteur Anthony Bourdain didn’t get fish tacos either (or for that matter, Nashville hot chicken). …

AmericanChickenTexas

GUS’S WORLD-FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno

When I told my friend Carlos my Kim and I would be enjoying Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken during our trip to Austin, he quipped “when did Los Pollos Hermanos open a restaurant in Texas?”.  Wrong Gus.  Obviously Carlos was joking about Gus Fring, the stoic Argentinian entrepreneur on the Albuquerque-based Breaking Bad television series.  Gus Fring, as you might recall, used his fried chicken franchise Los Pollos Hermanos as a front for methamphetamine distribution throughout the American Southwest.  The Colonel may have had eleven herbs and spices, but Gus had blue-hued crystal meth. The Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken of which I spoke is a burgeoning franchise which got its start in Memphis, Tennessee.  While Nashville’s incendiary, cayenne-heavy, finger-dying…

Dog FriendlyPizzaRated 25TexasUnited States

Via 313 – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno

It’s oft been said that among males (we’re such children), insults are a form of intimacy.  Perhaps because of societal expectations, many men aren’t comfortable expressing affection toward other males in physically demonstrative ways (even in the Age of Oprah).  In his book A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt – and Why They Shouldn’t, philosophy professor William Irvine contends “the closer the friend, the more teasing there is.”  If the sheer volume of insults is equal to how highly we esteem other men, Jim, my former boss at Intel was esteemed highly indeed. Because Jim was a pretty good guy (and because he was the boss), it was hard (and maybe career-limiting) to attack him on a personal level. …

BarbecueDog FriendlyTexas

Black’s Barbecue – Lockhart, Texas

Gil Garduno

Yabba-dabba-doo!  After finishing another day of toiling at the quarry, Fred Flintsone rushes home to pick up his modern stone-age family for a drive-in movie, an exclusive one-night only viewing of The Monster.  Courtesy of Fred’s two feet, the family then proceeds to Bronto Burgers & Ribs Drive-In for an order of ribs.  Somehow a slim waitress manages to heft the behemoth ribs over to Fred’s car, but when she deposits them onto the carhop window service tray, the vehicle and all its occupants tip over.  Until our visit to Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas, we believed ribs that big were to be found solely in animated television cartoons. Now we know better! If the mention of Lockhart, Texas triggered…

AmericanDog FriendlyDonutsTexasUnited States

Gourdough’s Public House – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno

Donuts could have gone their entire existences fat, dumb and happy with a following–mostly cops, adult men my age (39) and households with annual incomes of less than $10,000–who expected nothing more out of them than we were already getting.  Essentially just fried or fruit-filled delivery mechanisms for quadruple our recommended daily allowance of calories, sugar and guilt, donuts have always been predictable, unchanging…reliably there for us.  Our expectations for these sweet, ring-shaped fried cakes weren’t exactly very high.  Then something changed.  Donuts became “gourmet,” experiencing a much-needed make-over.   In recent years, several foods have experienced a similar artisinal reinvention, metamorphosing from tasty enough moths into glorious, flavor-packed butterflies.  A more demanding public–especially those of us who self-gloss as foodies…

AmericanBrunchChickenDog FriendlySouthernTexas

Lucy’s Fried Chicken – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno

“I‘m only eating the skins, so the chicken’s up for grabs.” ~Joey Tribbiani Several of my earliest memories of growing up in agrarian Peñasco, New Mexico involve chickens.  Some of those memories–such as getting viciously pecked by my Grandma Piedad’s cantankerous old rooster–were rather painful.  Other memories, however, were of mischievous fun my brothers and I had with our friends Estevan and Gabriel Lopez.  Once, for example, we emptied the contents of an entire can of beer onto the corn and grain mixture fed to the chickens.  It was hilarious fun watching drunken chickens stumble about and especially seeing the old rooster become overly amorous with the young chicks but not being able to do anything about it because he…

AmericanBrunchDog FriendlyTexas

Contigo – Austin, Texas

Gil Garduno

There are a phalanx of “best of” lists online and in print publications that celebrate restaurants deemed true stand-outs worthy of accolades.  Such lists are obviously very subjective though by no means definitive.  That holds true as well to the concept of restaurant review ratings, a mere snapshot in time valid really only to that reviewer at that very specific date and time of a visit.  Still, when we travel, I study the restaurant scene at our intended destinations, taking the pulse of what lay diners and cognoscenti have to say and yes, how they rate a restaurant.  When we visit a restaurant in a city to which we travel, we’re unfailingly well armed with information and know full well…

AmericanCaliforniaDog FriendlyFine DiningUnited States

Spencer’s Restaurant – Palm Springs, California

Gil Garduno

Dean Beck: What do you have against preachers? Clay Spencer: It’s what they preach against I’m against. Dean Beck: I’m afraid I don’t understand? Clay Spencer: They’re against everything I’m for. They don’t allow drinkin’ or smokin’, card playin’, pool shootin’, dancin’, cussin’ – or huggin’, kissin’ and lovin’. And mister, I’m for all of them things. ~Spencer’s Mountain In the family-centric 1963 movie Spencer’s Mountain, hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’ Clay Spencer (brilliantly portrayed by Henry Fonda) dreamed of building his wife Olivia (the stunning Maureen O’Hara) a beautiful home on a piece of land he inherited on Spencer’s Mountain. My dream was a bit less ambitious. My dream was to take my Kim to Spencer’s Restaurant at the Mountain, “one of…

AmericanBreakfastBrunchCaliforniaDog FriendlyUnited States

Cheeky’s – Palm Springs, California

Gil Garduno

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is widely credited with the aphorism “England and the United States are two nations divided by a common language.” My Kim and I had no idea just how different the Queen’s English is from the English spoken by the colonists until we were assigned to Royal Air Force Fairford. As part of the newcomers orientation, we were required to attend a course in which those vast differences were explained. Many of those differences were rather comedic, but we were warned, “if Yanks aren’t careful, we could perpetuate the dreaded “ugly American” stereotype widely held in some parts of Europe.” We learned, for example, that if an American serviceman walks up to an English lady and…

AmericanArizonaBreakfastUnited States

Butters Pancakes & Cafe – Scottsdale, Arizona

Gil Garduno

“Spread your tiny wings and fly away And take the snow back with you Where it came from on that day So, little snowbird take me with you when you go To the land of gentle breezes where the peaceful waters flow.” ~ Anne Murray Every autumn, gaggles of geese, flocks of ducks, kettles of hawks and constructions of cranes begin their long, arduous migration from the continent’s northern regions to warmer climes in the South. They fly in formation to more idyllic and much warmer locales such as the Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Similarly, large numbers of pasty-skinned human migrants from Canada and the northern tier of the fruited plains leave behind the rigors of snow shoveling,…