My self-imposed mission was straightforward: create a chili that my daughter, an 8-year-old monomaniac of buttered noodles, would embrace, or at least ingest. The path of least resistance was likewise clear: moderate spice, faint sweetness, a few blandishments like corn kernels and bacon. Like many quests, mine ended in ambiguity and unintended consequences. My daughter’s […]
David A. Ross
Bio: David Ross is a freelance food writer. He teaches at UNC and lives in Chapel Hill.
Posted inFood & Drink
Los Comales expands to S.W. Durham
Los Comales No. 2 3511 Witherspoon Blvd. 919-973-0961 $ “Best South Durham Resto News Ever” read the headline of a thread posted in September on Chowhound.com, the foodie chat forum. I should know enough to ignore such online hyperventilation, but I’m an eternal optimist, i.e., sucker. Holy mole! For once, the hyperventilation had merit. Los […]
Posted inFood & Drink
So many uses for flour and water
Cuisine is the art of dressing starch. The root task is getting the starch right. The rest is a matter of sprinkling cheese. If you master a few simple doughslet’s say tart, pie, puff, choux, pizza, pasta, tortillayou can parlay them into vast smorgasbords of cuisine that will silence the sniffiest mother-in-law or big-city sibling. […]
Posted inFood & Drink
One, in Meadowmont, is the best restaurant in the Triangle
One 100 Meadowmont Village Circle Chapel Hill 919-537-8207 Tuesday–Saturday 5:30–9:30 p.m. With golden-pedigreed chefs Kim Floresca and Daniel Ryan entering their fourth month at the stove, Chapel Hill’s One is so patently the best restaurant in the Triangle that local foodies will have to rediscover the joy of arguing politics and baseball. The burning question […]
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Nibbling on the fringes of Western lit: a gastronomic syllabus
Proust’s epic begins with a madeleine. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” asks, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is sloshed from start to finish. And yet these masterpieces are not about food. Comestibles are pretext, metaphor and symbol, but not essence. Foodies must nibble at […]
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Panzanella presents a high-maintenance pizza that’s worth the effort
Panzanella‘s margherita is the only local pizza I crave. Bella Mia and Pizzeria Toro produce dignified versions of the Neapolitan pie, but Panzanella’s piechewy, crispy, charred, slightly sourevokes the Northeastern corridor and the pizza ecstasy of my youth: the sore jaw, the burnt palate, the blood humming with glycemic joy. The master bakers of Weaver […]
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Lights, camera, eat! Favorite films about food
An art museum is a gastronomic space, so abundant are the feasting gods, last suppers, overflowing bags of game, bowls of glistening fruit and gleaners stooped amid wheat fields. Having lived their entire lives with the odor of dung in their noses, the Old Masters understood that the stray artichoke or haunch of venison belongs […]
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Monuts Donuts: Show up early and often
Monuts Donuts 110 E. Parrish St. Durham 919-797-2634 Wednesday–Monday 7 a.m.–2 p.m. (closed Tuesday) Home to Bull City Burger and Brewery, Dame’s Chicken & Waffles, Dos Perros, Loaf, Pizzeria Toro, Scratch Bakery, Rue Cler and Toast, Durham’s downtown offers what might be the Triangle’s densest concentration of good eats. “Good” in this instance not only […]
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Italy meets the South in Panciuto’s chestnut tagliatelle
Italian-American cuisine is famously specific to the Philly-Boston corridor, proving that demography (lots of Italians) trumps topography (a not particularly Mediterranean combination of concrete and snow). Recently, however, Triangle restaurants such as Oakleaf, Pizzeria Toro and Panciuto have demonstrated the viabilityindeed the deep logicof a Southern school of Italian-American cuisine. The South, after all, has […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Pizzeria Toro’s subtle and graceful cannoli
Pizzeria Toro serves flawless pizza crust. This is to say that it has solved the chief human problem and become an incarnation of the Buddha. I pleaded for the crust recipe, but the sages upon Mount Meru said, “Cannoli is all you get.” What godhead offers, I accept. Toro’s pizza and cannoli reflect the same […]