Food & drink

Food & drink

Fresh produce cost pennies at farm stands, potlucks were filled with top-tier dishes, and the local farmers' market and restaurants were overflowing with flavorful and fresh foods. My great-grandfather, an Italian immigrant, passed down his passion for food, and I was lucky enough to inherit his love of cooking and eating. As a chef and recipe designer, born and raised in Vermont, there's nothing I love more than trying new restaurants.

Krasi is the crown jewel of the Xenia Greek Hospitality group, a polished Back Bay gem that showcases the best of Mediterranean culinary flavors and a renowned Greek wine list. While dinner takes on a more moody, candlelit ambiance, it's the daytime brunch that is a bustling affair that requires reservations well in advance. Prepare to scooch around tightly packed tables and trip over stray bags, but it's all worth it in the name of the brunch menu.

Meat and cheese trays. They are wildly time-consuming: $100 bucks a tray, $30 in food, and at least an hour in labor. Every year, at one store, a company orders at least 100 trays. It's like a $20,000 order, and they want it delivered over the course of two weeks. So, for two weeks, two to three employees just sit back and make meat and cheese trays for eight hours a day.

Figuring out the best thing on the menu at your favorite fast food place is no easy task. Places like McDonald's and Burger King are constantly innovating with new menu items and experiences to keep you coming back. We all have our old favorites, but it never hurts to expand our horizons and try something different. So how do you know what's going to be worth your money? Ask the experts.

Self-basted and uniformly browned, nothing beats the flavors of delicious rotisserie chicken. Spinning the perfect meat, though? Apparently, that's not so easy. Tasting Table reviewed the most popular grocery store rotisserie chickens and ranked them worst to best, and one major chain's was a big disappointment: Publix. In fact, our taste tester cuttingly summarized that "The most interesting thing about Publix rotisserie chicken is the packaging." Ouch.

Stepping into a dive bar can become either a disastrous choice better forgotten or a platform for an evening you never want to forget. This gamble is part of the appeal of such establishments. Whether you're looking for no-frills booze or a cheap pint to wash away the day, some of the best dive bars in every state offer the drinks and the ambiance that contribute to stories you might want to retell.

And it's not just the pubs that are worth their salt in the capital. It's bars too. From sophisticated cocktail dens to sweet wine bars and trendy natty wine joints, London has everything whatever your tipple of choice may be. Now it's official: 35 bars in London have been named amongthe world's best in the Top 500 Bars list. And we can vouch, because we've sampled drinks at nearly every bar named on the list.

Now, if you're asking why, it's because carrots release more antioxidants than other veggies during the canning process - specifically beta carotene, which is essential for things like good vision, immune function, and to protect against chronic diseases. Not to mention, carrots make for a tasty side dish that most adults and kids alike can agree on. They don't get the same bad rap as something like broccoli or Brussels sprouts, which was why I set out to collect all the brands of store-bought canned carrots.

Here at Tasting Table, we're all about sustainable shopping practices like bringing along reusable shopping bags and buying in bulk for staples like rice. But, one of the most impactful, cost-effective, and often-overlooked strategies for saving money and reducing food waste during your weekly grocery run is to shop your kitchen first. Thoroughly check what is already in your kitchen to plan meals more effectively and shop less wastefully.

Few things are more exciting when you're out at the grocery store than finding a sale. Maybe you see boneless, skinless chicken breasts priced at $8.17 for two pounds, which is 20% off the normal price. That sounds great. But there's a five-pound tray for $12.85. The first one is over $4 per pound, while the second is just over $2.50.

Dishwashers are some of the most underrated appliances in the kitchen - they're always there to clean up the mess. But you do need to take care of your dishwasher so it can keep working as intended. Hard water mineral buildup and old food residue stuck in filters and corners can make your dishwasher run poorly and smell bad. There are things you can buy at the store

Revival Restaurant Group (Little Betty, Uptown Cantina, and the Family Dog) is ready to show off its shiny new interiors and menus for steakhouse Luella, which opens on Tuesday, November 25, in the former Ivy Buckhead space. Luella is billed as a "steakhouse inspired by European sensibilities," so there are slabs of premium beef and wagyu cuts, but the restaurant also offers plates of pasta and a few sushi rolls, because why not throw those in, too?

When Dani was there, Costco's setup had just three basic options in their pump dispensers. Worse, it didn't look very sanitary - there was a lot of sauce splatter around the station. What started as a single hot dog cart turned into Costco's iconic food court, and even if that $1.50 hot dog was a steal, the condiment bar didn't make it appetizing. Additionally, the pumps also mean there'd be a line while people are dressing their food, which can be a nightmare scenario of held-up lines on weekends or busy hours.

Chef Ron Sonderman's gift lies in elevating the comforting into the sublime. That's what he did with slow-smoked meats as the pitmaster at critically acclaimed Federalist Pig in Adams Morgan and with fried chicken at Honeymoon Chicken in Petworth. Now he's aiming to make his mark on Capitol Hill by tackling two other classics, fried wings and rotisserie chicken. On Dec. 6, Sonderman willtake to the patio of forthcoming Little Engine on Seventh Street SE, across from Eastern Market.

As a born-and-bred Southerner from the Mississippi Delta, where I spent childhood surrounded by cornfields, flooded rice paddies, and canopied pecan orchards, food was always central to the concepts of community, connection, and abundance. When shelling huge sacks of black-eyed peas or shucking corn on the front porch, it's a given that the bounty will nestle beside something fried by suppertime - preferably piled-high platters of crispy fried chicken. It's the unofficial multi-state symbol of Deep South cuisine, at least in my book.

On December 4, Milk Bar is teaming up with McCormick to give away free Eggnog English Toffee Cookies at two Manhattan locations, in honor of National Cookie Day. The first 100 customers at Milk Bar's flagship (Broadway and 29th Street) and its West Village shop (74 Christopher Street) will each score one of the limited-edition treats. Doors open at 10am in Nomad and 11am in the West Village.

I combined way too many foods that should've never met, and now it's your turn to make sense of the chaos. First up is a food fusion quiz! You'll get 10 images of completely made-up hybrid dishes that I created, and your job is to guess which two foods were combined to create each one. (For example, if you saw a slice of pie stuffed into an ice cream cone, the answer would be: Pie + Ice Cream).

According to the report, Market Basket - despite its continued family power struggle over its ownership - stood out for its low prices and favorable ratings for quality. Market Basket was one of the area's top-scoring chains for the quality of its produce and meat, and its prices were 15% lower than the average at all the stores the surveyors shopped.

There are some litmus tests to identify a dive, though they aren't always conclusive: Has the bar been around since the Hoover administration? Is there wall-to-wall carpeting? Does the bathroom fill you with unease? Is the OLCC's requirement to serve hot food begrudgingly met with microwaved meals, hot dogs, and maybe a fryer? But ultimately it comes down to that ineffable quality of vibes, and the sentiment made famous by Justice Potter Stewart in 1964: I know it when I see it.

In our ranking of 17 different Trader Joe's Thanksgiving products, the brand's Cornbread Stuffing with dried cranberries, roasted apples, and savory herbs came in last place. Don't be fooled by the tasty description and misleading photograph on the front of the box. A sweet and savory cornbread stuffing sounds delicious, but all we tasted with this box was salt. In fact, it was so salty that the sweet and bright cranberries and caramelized roasted apples were completely lost.

Pike Brewing (Seattle, Washington) will close Pike Pub and Pike Fish Bar, both located at the city's iconic Pike Place Market, it announced this week. The locations' final day of service will be November 30. All pints cost $4 until then, Pike shared. The closure comes slightly more than two years after Pike moved its brewing operations to a new facility in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood. That brewery does not have a taproom at the location.

I met my wife while working at Target, marking the beginning of what became a decadeslong career in retail. Over the years, I moved into leadership roles at several major brands before eventually joining a senior living company in a senior role. Then, in August 2019, I got a call that changed everything: I was being let go. At the time, my wife, Danielle - who'd also built a successful career - was home full-time with our four kids.

Momofuku founder David Chang says America's youth isn't drinking alcohol in the same way as earlier generations, and it has become the "real existential threat" to the restaurant industry. "Kids just don't drink anymore," Chang said in an interview with TBPN talk-show hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays this week. "They are never going to know what it is like to wake up at 3 p.m. in the afternoon and be like: 'Shit, I left my credit card in that bar.'"

A landmark study reveals that American cuisine typically features a greater range of ingredients compared with British. Scientists studied a data set of recipes covering 23 cuisines around the world - ranging from British and American to Thai and Eastern European. While Britain opts for carb-heavy comfort foods like meat and dairy, the US adds more in the way of herbs and spices. However, neither British nor American cuisine use spices and herbs at the same level as Indian cuisine.

According to Ksenia Prints of At the Immigrant's Table, these chimichangas take their main flavor notes from traditional birria tacos, which are corn tortillas stuffed with beef that's been cooked low and slow and then pulled to a stringy perfection. But what sets these tacos apart is the consommé that is served alongside them, for a diner's dipping pleasure. These chimichangas take the traditional birria filling and accompanying sauce, but wrap it up in a large flour tortilla, which then,

I used to eat paneer butter masala regularly with an Indian friend, Aditya, at a little place near Russell Square in London until one day something awkward happened that meant we never went back. That day, he made the error of wearing a black shirt and black trousers to dinner and, like a rugby player with the ball, was tackled a couple of times on his way to the bathroom as he was mistaken for a waiter.

Prized for its presentation, this fancy French potato dish, Duchess potatoes, dates back to the 1700s, when it was created and given its aristocratic name to help elevate the reputation of the humble tuber in France, where it had yet to be widely embraced by home cooks. These are my squiggly duchess potatoes. For a new take on mashed potatoes, we're looking back on a classic French potato dish.

The big harvesting opportunity comes during mautam, the rare mass flowering of bamboo (Melocanna baccifera) that triggers stink bug outbreaks. There isn't a fixed date or month; it's mostly around September-October, says Lalvohbika, a conservationist at Dampa tiger reserve in Mizoram. But weather patterns are changing these days. In 2022 we saw them as early as May and then again in September-October.

The king of cheeses is ready for the spotlight. The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, the governing body of the Italian cheese, has reportedly signed with United Talent Agency in order to pursue product placement opportunities in film and TV projects. According to a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, the organization is looking to "introduce Parmigiano Reggiano to a wide pool of partners [and] further its message of gastronomical excellence and high quality ingredients, production and distribution."

Lidia Bastianich notes that the traditional filling of pumpkin ravioli is simple. Instead of the traditional roasted Mantova squash, she uses butternut here and says it's a good substitute. She also uses crushed amaretti cookies, breadcrumbs, eggs, and grated Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano, so the filling is not too sweet. In the northern Italian city of Mantova, they add mostarda di Mantova, a chutney of preserved local fruit in syrup.