Dining and Opining

I'd like to round out my Restaurant Week posts by devoting today's review to the other class of food I love deeply, in addition to all the Asian food that's been on here this week. And that would be salad. Fresh, green, crisp, glorious salad. I've said before that I could eat nothing but salad every day for a year. And I don't think that's too much of a stretch. Of course, my kind of a salad goes way beyond just lettuce to include things like curry tofu salads and chickpea salads and bread salads ( panzanella ) and grain salads, and everything in between. So maybe that's cheating? So, when my salad cravings get the best of me (and there's no Sweet Tomatoes in sight), I head to my favorite local salad bar (besides the one at the Willy St. Co-op, which doesn't totally count because you pay by the weight): The Dayton Street Grille (formerly known as the Dayton Street Cafe). The Dayton Street Grille is inconspicuously located in the lobby of t...

So, as I selected my five favorite places to write about this week, it became pretty clear that one continent dominates all others. Asian cuisine is my star.  We've got our Lao/Thai , our Indian , our Chinese , and now back around to Lao, with the much-loved Lao Laan Xang. image from www.themangolassie.com This Madison classic has two east-side locations, one on Willy St. (1146 Williamson St.) and in in the Atwood neighborhood (2098 Atwood Avenue). Although I've heard that the original Willy St. location is superior, we have for some reason only ever gone to the Atwood Lao Laan Xang (perhaps because it's right across the street from our favorite walnut burger at Monty's Blue Plate). Besides, the Atwood location has beautiful art, among them my favorite colorful top-of-conical-hat painting. Anyone want to find/make a reproduction for me to hang in my living room? Pretty please? Lao Laan Xang offers all of the cool and delicate flavors that I first missed so muc...

I've written about Fugu on D&O before , giving a taste for its unusual Sichuan style cuisine through its signature hot pot. But because that wasn't the usual sort of food we have when visiting Fugu , this favorite Chinese restaurant of ours is definitely worth another post. image from thedailypage.com Fugu entered the Madison dining scene last year, filling a serious void in high-quality Chinese fare. And although my guess is that my vegetarian diet has significantly limited my exposure to the most authentic dishes on the Fugu menu (the ones that aren't even translated into English, and that involve things like organ meats and frog parts), it's still been a culinary revelation, introducing me to flavors and spices (like the Sichuan peppercorn !) that I'd never known before ( read this really interesting article about the peppercorn and its ecological role ). Although I don't currently have great photos of my favorite Fugu dishes, here are the ones th...

Indian buffets and I are like this:   In other words: I love Indian buffets. And so when Maharani opened on West Washington, just two blocks from where we lived our first year in Madison, it instantly became a treat that we savored whenever we could (though we quickly realized that eating a big Indian lunch almost always equaled the need for an afternoon nap--so it's not the best promoter of afternoon work productivity!) image from www.maharanimadison.com Although the dinners we've had there have also been impressive, Maharani is remarkable for its consistently delicious lunch buffet. It features a whole bank of salads and chutneys and sauces--you've got the tamarind and the mint and the tomato and the onion, and so much more! (even though Justin thinks the salad just takes up important real estate on the buffet plate, I contend that the raw vegetables serve as excellent cool and crunchy counterpoints to the warm and saucy entrees). Then there are the appetizers, fe...

As I wrote last Friday , this week is Restaurant Week here in Madison, and so I'm going to use this as an opportunity to write some reviews of my favorite restaurants, even though few of these are actually participating in the official Restaurant Week deal. The place I must begin when discussing Madison restaurants is the one, the only: Vientiane Palace Restaurant. image from foodskop.wordpress.com Vientiane is among my favorite places in town, and is hands-down Justin's favorite. I have to say though, this is a divisive restaurant--with fierce devotees and equally fierce bashers. It's not for the faint of stomach, nor for those who hold up ambiance or conventional attentive service as all-important.   Why go eat there, then, you may ask? Well, let me begin with the food. When I first ate at Vientiane back in 2006, I was hungry for the light, coconut-milky curries of the Thai food I knew and loved back in St. Louis, and so I found the offerings to be too heavy, too ...

Although I didn't do a particularly good job of responding to Mike's comment on my Cooking at Home post from a couple of weeks ago (as in, I didn't respond in written form at all), I have been thinking a lot about restaurants recently, as we've been eating out a lot with visiting friends. (And, it turns out, one of my favorite bloggers and Harvard Magazine have also been thinking about the topic). Just in time to prompt more thinking on the subject, next week is Restaurant Week here in Madison, in which tons of high-quality restaurants offer set three-course menus for $25, in order to let people sample places and tastes they might not have had before. In some ways, this also marks the half-birthday of this little blog, as my second post ever was a Restaurant Week review from Winter 2011, the first of the year's semi-annual event! So, in honor of Restaurant Week and this little milestone, I'm going to offer some reviews of a few local Madison eaterie...

Though the breakfast-lovers may damn me for it, I'm just not much of a breakfast person. Don't get me wrong, I love fruit and baked goods and fresh salads. I'm just not so into eggs or greasy pancakes or the various cuts of pig that greet so many Americans each morning. But when I was invited to a birthday brunch last weekend, I knew that the culinary masterminds who were hosting and who would be present would make me eat more than my fair share of breakfast foods, simply because of their prowess and creativity in the kitchen. My own contribution to this brunch potluck was inspired by the container of yogurt in the fridge left over from some recently-departed houseguests, and the mulberry tree still heavy with fruit near my home. Mulberry Yogurt Bread-y Cake was born! But because it was a sweltering day when this Mulberry inspiration struck, I didn't really want to turn on our big oven and heat up our whole house with it. So, I decided to try my hand at the toa...