If you talk with someone who is passionate about produce–someone who is an involved proponent of organic, locally produced food–they will swear up and down that where you get your food and the way you eat it has a direct relationship with survival of community and quality of life. Slow Food, a movement started in […]
Besha Rodell
Posted inNews
Sushi at the strip mall, and all over
When I left New York a year ago to return to the Triangle, I was six months pregnant. There are many discomforts and injustices that come with pregnancy, but for me the worst by far was the ban on raw fish. Sushi was all I wanted to eat, but I couldn’t even accompany my boyfriend […]
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Iron chefs, farmers’ market-style
For all of us who love to eat, this is an exciting time of year. It seems that every week, a new summer vegetable is coming into season, new dishes are possible, and the romance that we have with our favorite crisp green thing or plump red thing is born again. The places in the […]
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At Lime & Basil, pho is the real thing
Recently, a friend of mine said to me, “If there were a good Vietnamese restaurant in Chapel Hill, I could be happy to live here.” Vietnamese food has been one of the last yawning gaps in the Chapel Hill restaurant scene, and for many of us it has been a painful gap (you may think […]
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A Cary cafe makes life more interesting
The mark of a truly cultured city is not its fancy restaurants. It is the quality of its lunch spots and casual dinner spots, its cafes and bars. It is the places where regular people can afford to eat regularly. Every food enthusiast knows that life is most often enhanced by the simple things, the […]
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Getting the most out of truffles
If North Carolina is to be the next great truffle region of the world, we as good citizens should support this burgeoning industry, and eat more truffles. The exorbitant price of fresh truffles may dissuade you, but the taste is quite powerful, and a little truffle goes a long way. This past season, fresh black […]
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Black gold
For the past seven years, on a farm in rural Orange County, Franklin Garland and his wife, Betty, have been cultivating and harvesting black Perigord truffles. They were the first people in the United States to successfully cultivate the fungus, and apart from a small orchard just north of Raleigh they’ve helped get started, they […]
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The customer’s not always right
The dining experience is a symbiotic relationship between restaurant and customer. On each side of this relationship, there is a whole world of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, of frustration and joy. A wonderful customer can make a waiter’s night as much as a wonderful dining experience can make a customer’s night. Horrible customers and horrible service […]
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Slim pickings for New Year’s Day hair-of-the-dog
For me, New Year’s Eve has always been daunting; I’m exhausted from the weeks leading up to Christmas, there is too much pressure to have fun, the only dress that looks good on me is too skimpy for the freezing weather, and there is so much going on that the question of what to do […]
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A bigger taste of decadence
“How do we do this?” asks a baffled looking blonde woman standing in the housewares department with a very full cart of her companion. “Do we just go through here or what?” She was hoping to be able to pay for her items, and she was not sure how to go about it. The new […]