Brendan Cox, chef-owner of Oakleaf in Pittsboro, characterizes his cuisine as “well-travelled Franco-Italian as if prepared by a grandmother who lives in the kitchen.” Cox’s ricotta gnocchi illustrate the point. You can almost hear a huffing voice calling from behind the kitchen door, “Mangia! Mangia!” If your grandmother is not a peasant-artisan of the flour-dusted […]
David A. Ross
Bio: David Ross is a freelance food writer. He teaches at UNC and lives in Chapel Hill.
Posted inFood & Drink
Lines are long at Rise, Durham’s newest bakery
Rise 8200-1003 Renaissance Parkway, Durham 919-248-2992 Website Twitter Facebook Monday–Sunday 7 a.m.–2 p.m. I first glimpsed Rise Biscuits and Donuts through the windshield of my parked car. A crowd spilled onto the sidewalk as if it were Black Friday and doughnuts were price-slashed consumer electronics. Inside, a tape machine dispensed numbers, while patrons waited as […]
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Pizzeria Toro: a near bull’s-eye
Pizzeria Toro 105 E. Chapel Hill St. Durham 919-908-6936 Daily 11 a.m.–11 p.m. If the dystopian strip mall has an emblem, it’s the stainless steel, double-deck, gas-burning pizza oven. Generating a barely balmy 450 degrees, it reheats hours-old slices by the million and sends them out into parking lots, to be eaten as we search […]
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Dim Sum House’s Baked Pork Buns
The Chinese pork bun (kao bao) beats your everyday hamburger at its own game. It substitutes a baby cheek of golden brioche for mass-produced white bread, cubes of lacquered roast pork for the pre-formed patty and salty-sweet russet custard for the usual Heinz products. The burger is a stalwart protein delivery device, a noble foil […]
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Oakleaf is haute cuisine grounded by homespun instinct
Oakleaf 480 Hillsboro St. Pittsboro 919-533-6303 Monday–Thursday 11 a.m.–2 p.m. 5:30–9 p.m. Friday 11 a.m.–2 p.m. 5:30–10 p.m. Saturday 10 a.m.–1 p.m. 5:30–10 p.m. Oakleaf is well named. As the leaf spurns the affectations of the hothouse, so the restaurant spurns the affectations of post-millennial cuisine. It does not embody a rigorous Japanese minimalism. Nor […]
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Enrigo Italian Bistro: pizza, pasta, panna cotta
Enrigo Italian Bistro 575 New Waverly, Suite 106, Cary 919-854-7731 Lunch: Monday–Saturday Dinner: Nightly From its nook in the rear of Waverly Place in Cary, Enrigo Italian Bistro overlooks a poodle-trimmed, fountain-lulled mini-park whose ensemble lacks only a urinating cupid. Resisting this New Urban artificiality, Enrigo serves up hearty, earthy, unselfconscious versions of the Italian […]
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The secret to Mediterranean Deli’s specialties
Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street is a long buffet: One walks the strip noting expensive artisanal sandwiches, reheated pizza slices, faux-Mexican fast food and endless iterations of the burger. A Franklin Street mainstay since 1992, Mediterranean Deli tends to bang the gavel on this internal debate. “FALAFEL” sounds the gavel. Falafel is cheap, filling, healthy, quick […]
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A feisty sauce: Super Wok’s Sichuan red oil
In these doleful days of Chinese fast food, sauces arrive on trucks. The saucier is the guy who unpacks them. Your goopy mound of sweet-and-sour chicken may, in fact, owe less to Uncle Chen than to Uncle Ben, which sells gallon jugs of mall-ready sauce for $42.35. This corner-cutting obscures the elaborate saucemanship of Chinese […]
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Lords of the rings: These onions are to cry for
Vidalia is a lovely word, as oldfangled, ornate and homespun as the South itself. Its poetry encompasses buzzing bees, clattering screen doors and the Southern spring in general. Named for the Georgia town whose soil and climate give rise to its unique properties, the great onion reappears each April to lend new sweetness to hushpuppies, […]
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At Tonali, the secret of fish taco success is in the tortilla
The story of the Baja-style fish taco supposedly begins with the Japanese fishermen who plied their trade off the west coast of Mexico as early as the 1920s. They naturally wanted to dine on the day’s catch and attempted to convey what they had in mind to the locals. What emerged from the kitchen was […]