You Can Dance If You Want To: City Eases Mucky Duck Restrictions
Rejoice, Monterey: can now dance to the live music on The Mucky Duck's patio. And drink inside til 1:30am! The city Planning Commission voted this week to ease current operating restrictions placed on the Duck's new owners, Anthony and Alex Buich, when they took over in June. Anthony Buich argues ...
Wo Hing Opens in S.F.'s Mission District, and Why It Matters to Monterey County
Even as Charles Phan continues to further cement himself as one of the most influential chefs in the West and the wider world, he is making more and more appearances in Monterey County. This last year alone, he was a key ingredient at a Pebble Beach clambake fundraiser for the ...
Restaurant Week In a Night (Or, Why Fandango Rules)
A one-night tour of Monterey Restaurant Week leads to interesting discoveries, including affection for an old favorite.
Trippy 'Special Effects' Cocktail Recipes for Halloween
A lot of bizarre and even spooky missives make their way to my desk and inbox. A little while back, in came a six-page, single-spaced, fastidiously typed, "air-mailed" letter from Canterbury Ward at the Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, England, from a man named Ian Ball who says he was falsely ...
National Seafood Month Salute to 24 Local SeafoodWatch Partners
Maybe it's me, but I love not having to beg a server to check with the kitchen on where they get the prawns or how they snag their snapper. Before October, also known as National Seafood Month, evaporates in a cloud of bobbing-for-apples dry ice, let's salute the peeps who ...
'Food Day' Call to Action: Less Corn and Soy, More Nutrition and Common Sense
One of my colleagues just emailed me, "I thought every day was Food Day." But other emails appearing in my in box, from Slow Food USA and United Farm Workers, suggest otherwise. Both are looking to leverage a newly rekindled holiday of sorts. Yes, folks, it's Food Day. First, word ...
Tasting the Goods at a New Small Purveyor Incubator
Like barbecue sauce and garlic bread, or bacon, avocado and jack (on a chicken sandwich, perhaps?!), or mushrooms, pepperoni and olives on a thin-crust pizza, some tasty things go together beautifully. We can add Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (758-1469), better known as ALBA, the Salinas nonprofit which gives aspiring ...
Hooch Rules: Do's and Don'ts of Making Your Own Sauce (and Clues for Brews Too)
To hang with local organic farmer and Weekly food writer Jamie Collins at her home/farm/ranch in Aromas is to bask in self-sufficiency. She has goats, avocado trees, a citrus orchard, heirloom tomatoes and herbs galore, and leverages all of them to the maximum. One of the ways she does more ...
A Look at the First Ever L.A. Food & Wine—and the Locals Who Made It Go
Randy Jackson of American Idol fame made his debut as a DJ. at Los Angeles Food & Wine's red-carpet opening gala. Something he spun early on felt particularly appropriate, and it wasn’t Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” It was his selection of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'.” Something big, something ...
How to Burn Your Mouth Off: A Local Ghost Pepper Story
Ghost pepper growers in Salinas try to tap the power of the world's hottest pepper.
New Locally Based Wine Review Website 'Guurgle' Gathers Input in Carmel
A new oenophile-friendly service is making moves in the local wine world and, hopefully, beyond. The site www.guurgle.com, according to CEO/COO Terry Pershall of Monterey, wants to be "the Google of the wine world." Guurgle as Google? That's a pretty big sip. But the plan is to compile tons of ...
A Fine Nine: Upcoming Local Edible Events Your Calendar Deserves to Know About
It's like a buffet that never ends. And these events are all stuffed into just the next week or so: 1. Monterey Bay Restaurant Week Take it from none other than the original Napster sharing program, The Ray of Bronx-bred Hope, my illustriously loco predecessor in this space, Ray “Mundo” ...
On the Search for a Snappy Salad and Other Good Greens
News flash: Monterey County produce nourishes the country. But as Weekly staff writer/organic salad freak Rebecca Robinson has found since moving here from Portland, there ironically isn't a corresponding network of superior salad spots. While she couldn't set her time table to do an exhaustive search of the area's rabbit ...
Gonzales Whiskey and Other Epicurean Notes You Should Know
At least one guy has got society snookered. Drinking Made Easy host Zane Lamprey is running around drinking for a living. He recently discovered what some of us already knew during an episode that airs on HDNet (www.hd.net) 8pm Wednesday, Oct. 19: Fog’s End Distillery of Gonzales (809-5941) makes clear, ...
More Harvest Bounty Insight: Pickling, Revisited and Reinvented
Behold the abundance of the past few weeks. Farmers markets are flush with melons, tomatoes and chard. Greens are go. Life is good. But as surprising rains seem to hint, the winter cometh. Yesterday the Food Blog looked at some of the neglected benefits of winter greens, including clever and ...
A Farmer's Cozy Kale Recipe as Winter Greens Season Arrives
Last week Weekly food writer and local organic farmer Jamie Collins of Serendipity Farms in Carmel Valley riffed insightfully on the often underappreciated properties—and often overlooked varieties—of kale in a piece called "All Hail Kale: Chewing on a range of tasty ways to enjoy the nutrient-rich green." "While several types ...
Crack a Six-Pack…of Quickly Onrushing Food-and-Drink Events
The eventfulness is appetizing, but it's approaching absurd. Here, just a sample of the action arriving in the next week or so, reveals lofty foie gras in Carmel and killer international value in Marina, a big ol' luau on the Pacific and an unprecedented winemaker dinner in the valley. Six ...
Sneak Peek at Wine & Dine Special Signature Dish Publication 2.0
It never fails: Get chefs and restaurant owners on the horn and things get interesting—and it gets hard to focus on anything other than really good food. My normally steady diet of communication with restaurant types has accelerated of late because we are gathering information for our second annual Wine ...
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