After conducting research into restaurants, I have noticed a trend: large restaurants reviewing websites have some helpful tips, but can be overwhelming and not as helpful when looking for a unique dining experience. Instead, I tend to find the most useful information about unique dining experiences from websites dedicated solely to specialty types of restaurants.

Each specialty restaurant website caters to just one type of restaurant, thereby providing a lot of in-depth information about that type of restaurant. You are provided with recommendations based on local culinary traditions and cultural aspects related to the cuisine in question.

Coffee lovers in Chicago might appreciate BestCafeChicago.org , which focuses entirely on the city’s café scene. Cafés are organized by neighborhood and specialty drinks, making it easy to find a quiet work spot, a weekend hangout, or a great espresso nearby.

And for anyone navigating London’s constantly changing food scene, London Best Eats offers regularly updated restaurant rankings. The weekly updates make it especially useful if you want recommendations that actually reflect what’s good right now.

For example, Chicago Taco Spot , which specializes in Mexican cuisine, provides only Mexican-style tacos. The website provides detailed information about the different styles of tacos and where they can be found as well as the restaurants that are known throughout Chicago for being authentic. The advice you feel you are getting from Chicago Taco Spot does not come from an algorithm that has been programmed with your preferences; rather, it is coming from a local that loves to eat tacos and has experienced every taco restaurant in Crystal Lake.

If you're a fan of steak, the Steakhouses NY website provides a comprehensive directory of steak houses across New York State. Instead of searching extensively through tons of information, simply click on the state where you wish to dine and you will be presented with a comprehensive list of the best steak houses in that area.

Then there’s HaitianFoods.org , which goes beyond restaurant listings. It celebrates Haitian cuisine and culture, sharing traditional dishes, stories, and restaurants from around the world. It feels less like a guide and more like a cultural space built around food.

These specialty restaurant review websites remind me that local and community-based restaurants provide a better way to identify a restaurant that will offer you a dining experience that will be both personal and rewarding.

For decades, the trademark for Gourmet magazine was held by Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and more.

Even after the magazine was shuttered in 2009, devastating the food literati, the company renewed the trademark. Until recently.

On Tuesday, Gourmet will be rebooted as an online newsletter on the platform Ghost. Like its eponymous predecessor, it will prioritize publishing words and recipes with complexity. Unlike old Gourmet, it will be operated by five 30-something journalists, without the infrastructure of a media conglomerate.

The new Gourmet joins a wave of worker-owned publications eschewing corporations such as Condé Nast, with journalists taking on more entrepreneurial roles as large media employers shrink or sell off. (Hell Gate, 404 Media and Defector also follow this model.) Contributors will be paid for the work they produce, plus a portion of profits from new subscriptions that their work attracts.

Founded in 1941, Gourmet magazine was one of several titles closed during the financial crisis. Edited by Ruth Reichl for its last decade, the magazine was more intellectual, worldly and elite than, say, Bon Appétit, its Condé cousin, which is still in circulation. It published David Foster Wallace’s famous essay “Consider the Lobster” and the Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx’s first short story. James Beard was Gourmet’s restaurant critic for years.

In this spirit, the new founders dismissed questions about their immediate video or podcast plans. “Good writing is really cool,” said Nozlee Samadzadeh, a co-founder who is employed as a software engineer at The New York Times. “We’re going to see where we go after that.”

A delicious sandwich from Vietnam. This quick video shoes you what you need and how to assemble it.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32309114

Hello delicious friends!

I am very excited to meet you and introduce myself properly - I go by Greenbeard and have been co-opted as a new moderator of this lovely community, and promise will do my best to help run everything nice and smoothly alongside @quercus@slrpnk.net and @AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net

Check out new food help resources on the Wiki!

One of the things we started working on together with Quercus is this List of resources on how to stay fed this winter with the weather what it is and economy going to shit, it is important that everyone knows how to access these resources for their own sake as well as their community. And if these are not of use to you, maybe it would be a cool New Year's thing to get involved with them as a volunteer? This wiki is like a community fridge, take what you need and leave what you can, as you can see it is still very much Work in Progress, so if you have an idea to add to it, definitely do so (you can log into the wiki with the same login and password that you use for SLRPNK.NET) or let us know your ideas in the comments here or in the chat.

Yeah, I said chat!

Did you know that you can come over and hang out with us and talk all things solarfood in our brand new chat? Now you know! Again, you can use the exact same credentials as you use for SLRPNK.NET, how convenient is that?!

Say hi!

Also, say hi in the comments, let us know about all the cool and interesting things that you found out about everything and anything foor and/or solarpunk related, or maybe you have an amazing project/plan/idea to do in 2026? I'd love to hear it!

Friends

Also, show some love to a new community here, !foodnotbombs@slrpnk.net, it is an amazing initiative; I personally was a member of Food Not Bombs collectives in two different cities that I lived, definitely go and give them a look!

BTW, the graphic in this post is "Solarpunk Anarchy" by Sean Bodley at Story Seed Library licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0, definitely go and give him a good look, and some monies if you can!

My college roommate stumbled into running a couple of pizza places a bit over 20 years ago. He went with flat-rate pricing, because, honestly, pizzas are really cheap to make.

$9.99, any toppings (within reason). I think they were 16 inches (only one size as well). I'd go up to visit from time to time, and he'd tell me to make myself a fucking pizza. The dough was proofed and the toppings at hand. Not sure what the health department would think about that, but they were very good pizzas.

I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. (Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.) I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins — essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.

I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain — my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (that’s her pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.

Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too.

• garlic. The house smells so good right now.

And a touch of black truffle hot sauce on top.

Very tasty!

In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant, according to data provided to me by the National Restaurant Association, a trade group. The share of customers using delivery specifically, as opposed to picking up takeout or going to a drive-through, more than doubled from 2019 to 2024. In a recently released poll by the association, 41 percent of respondents said that delivery was “an essential part of their lifestyle.” For Millennials and Generation Z—the apex consumers of today, and of tomorrow too—it’s apparently even more essential: More than half of adults under 45 use delivery at least once a week, and 13 percent use it once a day. Five percent use it multiple times a day. But the delivery boom isn’t confined to young people or to urbanites: About one in eight Baby Boomers uses delivery once a week, and so does about one in five rural dwellers. We are a nation of order-inners. A world, really—earlier this year, DoorDash announced a deal to acquire the British delivery service Deliveroo for $3.86 billion; the new, combined company will have 50 million monthly active users, spread over more than 40 countries.

For as long as fast-food and pizza joints have existed, certain restaurants have been defined by, and designed for, takeout and delivery. But delivery has now come for what industry analysts call “full-service restaurants”—that is, the types of places where a server guides you through your meal from start to finish, or at least used to. These days, 30 percent of those restaurants’ orders are consumed somewhere else, according to the National Restaurant Association. The fanciest, most famous restaurants are still doing mostly table service, but just about every other establishment has been conscripted into the army that ferries hot food out of professional kitchens and into American mouths 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Meanwhile, the longtime industry analyst Joseph Pawlak told me, “you could shoot a cannon” through many dining rooms on a Tuesday night.

In effect, delivery has reversed the flow of eaters to food, and remade a shared experience into a much more individual one. If communities used to clench like a fist around their restaurants, now they look more like an open palm, fingers stretched out as far as possible, or at least to the edge of the delivery radius.

Saw a neat piece about someone who recreated a 1611 Spanish recipe for “panecillos” or “colaciones” and wanted to share. They followed the old instructions (from a 1611 cookbook) and tested ingredients and methods to match texture and flavor — lean, slightly sweet rolls with a rustic crumb and a hint of spice. The tester adjusted hydration and proofing for modern flours and ovens, and reports pleasingly authentic results: crisp, lightly browned crusts and an interior denser than modern soft rolls, with a pronounced wheaty, slightly toasted flavor.

Despite traveling to Vietnam a half dozen times to write about the cuisine, until now I had overlooked phở as a subject, perhaps because of its ubiquity on every Vietnamese restaurant menu. But one day while enjoying a bowl of it in New York City, I thought: Phở is the national dish of Vietnam, devoured from Ha Long Bay to the Mekong Delta. But where did it actually originate?

I knew its roots were in northern Vietnam. I also knew that phở bắc—northern phở—is different from the phở I’d been eating most of my life. In the U.S., we’re usually served the southern Vietnamese version, whose broth is sweeter and more herbaceous, and the dish comes with a side of sprouts, Thai basil, cilantro, hoisin sauce, sriracha, and jalapeño. In the north, the broth lacks the same sweetness, and the side accompaniments are usually pickled garlic and sliced red hot peppers. I’d fallen hard for northern-style phở.

When I asked friends in Vietnam about its origins, their responses varied. Some said phở—most easily pronounced fuh for English speakers—was first created in Hanoi. Others pointed to an outlying province. To complicate matters, theories differed about the influence of French colonialism and Chinese occupation. To trace the soup’s roots, not to mention find the best bowl of phở in Vietnam, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the capital, Hanoi.

Turns out getting takeout takes longer than cooking at home. I of course would make a vegan version, but that would also save like half the price of the meat.

Was watching an old episode of Mama's Family the other day and this was mentioned. I had no idea what it was, so I landed here. Probably gonna give this a try sometime this week because it looks amazing. I also don't see casseroles very often anymore.

In my area, cooking wine does not exist. I can only easily find Sherry (for drinking) at 15% alcohol. I was told it should have 20% to be shelf-stable for ~6—24 months.

There is white port at 19½% alc. Not sure if that differs much from sherry in taste, but I suppose 19½% is close enough for shelf-stability.

Should I add table salt to the sherry to make it shelf stable? Or add brandy? Or switch to white port? Or even just brandy?

My main use: less than ~½—¾ shot mixed with corn starch as the thickening basis for stir-fries. I don’t really use sherry for anything else. I don’t even drink it because I so commonly use it in stir-fries that as a straight drink it’s like drinking Kung Pao Chicken because I can’t mentally dissociate it.

I also wonder if I should be looking for dry sherry, or simple sherry. I want the stir-fries to have the sweetness of strong sherry, so I guess dry variants would be contrary to that.

update -- still unclear

Folks are saying ~12—15% is enough for shelf-stability. The non-fortified wines I have are in that range. So I’m baffled because I believe normal wine turns to vinegar if left at room temp after opening.

I also wonder if Sherry is only very slightly fortified since 15% isn’t much more than normal wine.

I made this up because I was hungry. It worked pretty well, but the bouillon made it a bit too salty.

Ingredients: chicken, noodles, bouillon, vegetables, cheese, onion, garlic, sour cream, spices.

1. Grab a handful of noodles and place in small pot, then cover with water.
2. Start boiling noodles on high while adding bullion.
3. Chop up some onions and garlic and add to pot with whatever veg (I used 1/2 lb frozen green beans). Add more veg than visually makes sense because the noodles will get bigger). Reduce heat.
4. Chop up leftover chicken -- including skin -- and throw in pot. If you have fussy kids, chop skin small enough that it'll blend in. I had leftover rotisserie.
5. Add some cheese and spices once the chicken is warmed up. I used cheddar for color and Herbes de Provence.
6. Turn off heat and gently stir in some sour cream to cool it down. Don't go overboard. Serve in bowl with a grind of pepper on top. Eat with spoon.

I can't afford a house, but I can afford a delicious breakfast.

Legitimately my favorite breakfast dish and you can make it for under $1.50 and in less than 10 minutes.

Two pieces of buttered toast = $.19

One avocado = $.59

Two over easy eggs = $.43

Sriracha

A few drops of lemon juice

Everything bagel seasoning

As a non-native english speaker my search for recipes has lead me wondering what the hell is a "spanish onion" as some recipes call for. my understanding from googling is that it is a special variety of the basic yellow onion kind of like varieties like san marzano are for tomatoes or just another name for the 'basic yellow onion.'

When I can't sleep, I food prep. I decided to share today's results. I've made this vegetarian enchilada recipe before, and found the process for roasting poblanos inferior. I also modified the enchilada ingredients, and wanted a more powerfully poblano sauce. It tasted better before I added too many ingredients, so tonight I experimented by making something more like the title recipe above.

First I roasted the poblanos whole in the oven broiler. Using a gas stove burner or a grill outside also works. Next was the messy part of skinning and seeding them after they had a chance to cool a little in a bag. Image of the result:

I then added everything except sour cream and blended. Food processors or any blender works for this. I used an immersion blender.

After blending, I took a little out before adding sour cream so I could use it in guacamole, which I suddenly decided I should make. So, back to the blender and onto the guac.

I used store bought salsa fresca, more garlic, and red onion. Since guacamole goes bad quickly, I only used 2 avocados and mashed by hand (not blender).

After a good mash, I added lime juice, mixed, then cilantro last so I could stir it in without smashing the delicate leaves. And done! We'll have nachos with guacamole today and use sauce for some unknown dinner.