Whenever I attend a convention, there’s always the official con, and then the con away from the con, which typically involves at least one great meal. And that’s the way it was with Capclave, which was just held in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I took part in four panels—three to which I’d previously been assigned plus one I was added to at the last minute to replace a panelist who couldn’t make it.

I enjoyed sharing what wisdom I could on such panels as “Building Your Audience”—which ended with me invalidating all the advice I’d given during the previous hour when I quoted William Goldman’s maxim that “Nobody knows anything”—and “Food In Fiction”—during which I explained why Rene Redzepi uses ants in his New Nordic cuisine.

While I found all of that to be fun—you know me, put a microphone in front of me and I won’t shut up—the most important panel was probably the “Tiptree Retrospective,” which was captured above in a photo taken by Barbara Krasnoff. That’s Jim Freund, Julia Rios, Sarah Pinsker, me, and David Hartwell (who’d been Alice Sheldon’s editor and had actually visited her at home) reminiscing about that great writer in this, the year in which she would have turned 100. (more…)

This year’s list of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants has just been announced, and though I didn’t hit as high a number of honorees here as I did for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, I’m happy to see I made it to what’s considered #2 and #3, plus #25 as well.

And man, do I want to get back to #2!

To find out why, and to see what I thought of the other two restaurants I visited, click on the links below. (more…)

Next released a video earlier today for its new menu—Terroir—which will be the restaurant’s fifteenth incarnation.

As anyone who knows me knows, I love, love, love Next. The amazing food is the main reason, of course. But there’s also the fact that Next is a culinary Brigadoon, here for a brief time, then gone, changing its theme three times a year. With most restaurants, you can always say, “Oh, I’ll head there some other time.” Not so with Next.

Miss a menu and you’ve lost your chance forever. Which, for me, gives each meal an added emotional resonance. It’s like tasting a dream.

Hyperbole? OK, sure, somewhat. But not by much. Which is why I made it to six of the fourteen menus Next has hosted so far.

But now comes Terroir, which has its first service tomorrow. And sadly, even if I were in Chicago, this is a meal I’d have to skip—it’s a wine-based menu, and since I don’t drink, its charms would be lost on me.

*Sniff*

Check out the video below, though, because if great wine plus great food is your kind of thing, you won’t want to miss Terroir.

If you’re unfamiliar with the sort of experience Next provides, check out my prior posts on their Sicily, Kyoto, The Hunt, Vegan, Bocuse d’Or, and Tapas menus.

As for what the future will bring, at this point … no one knows. The three menus for 2016 are still being conceived by the chefs, and likely won’t be announced until the first week of December.

One thing I do know, though. Next year, when the Nebula Awards will be once more be held in Chicago—I’ll be back at Next!

Back when Bon Appétit named Rose’s Luxury the Best New Restaurant in America 2014, the writer of the piece stated that “Rose’s isn’t just in the restaurant business; it’s in the making-people-happy business,” while Chef and owner Aaron Silverman was quoted as saying, “I just want to make people happy.”

Last night, when Irene and I dropped by to celebrate our 39th anniversary, Silverman and his staff met and exceeded that goal.

That isn’t the easiest of feats for a place that takes no reservations, yet remains so popular most customers wait at least a couple of hours to be seated. We’d arrived at 3:05 to make sure we could be part of the first seating at 5:00, and by the time the doors opened, the line stretched behind us down the block, took a right turn, and then vanished into an alley.

But people are willing to put up with it because the food and the service are that good. Whatever weariness we felt from our long wait vanished before the smiles of the enthusiastic staff, and from what we found waiting for us when we got to our table. (more…)

Those who know me know that when I attend conventions, I pay as much attention to the dining options outside the event as I do to the programming within. So it was with Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention.

So I scoped out Spokane’s culinary highlights, and then managed to hit almost all of what I’d planned. (Though I’m sorry to have missed out on Frank’s Diner. Sorry, but my stomach can only do so much. Breakfast there will have to wait until some future trip to Spokane.)

I wish I could have shared my eating adventures while the con was still going on, because one friend admitted to me that if he wanted to know where to eat on any given day, he could simply look at where I’d eaten the day before. In any case, here’s some of what what crossed my lips last week during Worldcon.

Satellite Diner

I arrived in Spokane late Sunday night, and ended up starting off in that city at the restaurant where I thought I’d end my visit more than a week later Monday morning before my pre-dawn flight to Dulles. The Satellite Diner is open every night until 4:00 a.m., and so is the perfect place to get sober before heading home … or in my case, to grab a late-night dinner after tumbling off a cross-country flight. My bacon Swiss burger with lettuce, tomatoes, and red onion was exactly what it was supposed to be, prepared by a master short order cook whom it was a delight to watch as I ate. (more…)

After I told you about our recent trip to visit the Ohio Light Opera as well as multiple ancient Native American sites, it turns out that what you really wanted to know was … hey, Scott, where did you eat along the way?

So here’s where I did eat along the way, which—though it wasn’t our original plan—ended up including three meals of brisket.

Casselman Inn
Grantsville, Maryland

Our first stop the morning our mini-vacation began was about two hours out from home at the Casselman Inn, which had been built in 1842. They supposedly cook up some great fried chicken, but we hadn’t planned on taking time just yet to sit for a meal, so after stretching our legs by looking around the gardens and historic building, we picked up a tray of sticky buns to go in three flavors—pecan, vanilla-frosted, and maple-frosted.

A good start to the day. My only disappointment was that I’d expected nuts under the frosted sections, and alas, there were none. (more…)

Ever since the Kirk Polland Memorial Bad Prose Competition stopped being a thing at Readercon, I’ve been slipping off with friends on Saturday nights to satisfy my inner foodie. (Actually, I don’t think I keep that I’m a foodie inside at all. Anyone who visits here often knows all about it.) That meant visiting Journeyman in 2013 and 2014, but this year called for a different destination, thanks to social media.

For the past nine months or so, Cecilia Tan, David Shaw, and Diane Martin (seen with me below) have been tantalizing me with Twitter and Instagram pics from Night Market, a new restaurant which specializes in Asian street food. When Readercon was just around the corner, I demanded (nicely, of course) that they take me there. (more…)

Henry David Thoreau admonished us to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes” … but what about enterprises that require new cooking equipment? I suspect he would have dissed those as well.

But as I was determined to bake Paul Fehribach’s Jelly Roll Cake recipe in The Big Jones Cookbook (from the pages of which I’d previously cooked chicken and dumplings, circa 1920) for the annual 4th of July bash thrown by John Pomeranz and Kathi Overton, and had never before made a jelly roll, I was forced to buy a new pan and send Thoreau spinning in his grave.

And so, armed with a jelly roll pan, I got started. (more…)

I haven’t lived in Brooklyn for decades, but during the 30 years I did live there, I never once ventured into the neighborhood known as Red Hook. Never wanted to. Why? I blame Thomas Wolfe.

I encountered his short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” at an early age, and Red Hook was depicted as a place in which a teenager most definitely would not want to wander. (Well, this teenager anyway.)

I’m sure the area had changed between the 1936 publication of the story in The New Yorker and the time I first read it in the early ’70s, but still … I had no plans to go there. And so never did. Until Tuesday, when I was brought there by BBQ.

Hometown Bar-B-Que, to be precise. (more…)

So last night I had Chef Paul Fehribach over for dinner.

Sort of.

To be more precise—I was so impressed by my recent meal at Big Jones that I picked up a copy of Chef Paul Fehribach’s new cookbook before I left his restaurant. (I wasn’t the only one of us who did that.) And last night was my first attempt at turning one of his recipes into reality.

Before I used The Big Jones Cookbook that way for its intended purpose, I read it from cover to cover and found it the most interesting cookbook since James Beard’s American Cookery, which is perhaps the first I ever bought. Both are entertaining to read, and I even saw parallels in each chef’s defense of quality ingredients and sadness over the sorry state of what we have to put up with when it comes to food these days. And though 43 years separate the “these days” of Fehriback and Beard, I sensed a kinship between them. (more…)