Just another month of summer before things get underway for the new school year. I’ve been cooking up a storm at home since we got back from California at the end of June. Those of you who follow me on Instagram have seen some of that (the rest of you should follow me on Instagram—what’s wrong with you?). All that cooking—and, okay, some other commitments as well—has meant I’ve not been able to make as much headway as I would have liked on my backlog of travel meal reports. If it can be believed, I still have one report to go from Seoul in February/March and one more to go from New York in May—to say nothing of a whole bunch from Northern and Southern California. Well, I hope to have the Seoul and New York reports in the bag by this weekend (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) and most of the California reports done by the end of August. Don’t complain: at least my booze reviews have been published on schedule. Okay, enough about my unreliable posting: what were people reading on the blog in July?
Here are the top 10 most viewed posts for the month:
- Eating at Mercato Centrale (Florence, June 2023)
- Simple Tamarind Chutney
- Bukhara (Delhi, March 2022)
- Trattoria Monti (Rome, June 2023)
- Ha Tien Super Market (St. Paul)
- At Namdaemun Market, Pt. 2: Eating (Seoul, March 2023)
- Oro II (Minneapolis)
- Brown Rice Khichdi with Three Dals
A lot of familiar entries on the list with only three that weren’t in last month’s top 10. Of those, the tamarind chutney recipe raced up the charts courtesy a link from Rancho Gordo, who included one of my recipes in their Salad of the Day series in July (the tamarind chutney recipe is linked in it). How it is that the brown rice khichdi recipe also came to be read so much in July, I have no idea. Once again, I wish that those who come to the blog for recipes would leave a note if they like what they make. [Of course, this might mean…] The third new entry is my review of our second meal at Oro at the start of the month. My review of our dinner at Alma at the very end of June ended up just barely outside the top 10. I was also curious to see that my review of Owamni from early 2022 was just outside the top 10 as well. It’s not that it has not been read steadily since I posted it but why this sudden uptick? I could ask the same about the recent sustained interest in my review from 2017 (!) of Desi Vibes, an unremarkable Delhi restaurant. Ah well.
On the booze front, I am currently at the lowest number of whisky bottles I have had open in almost 15 years. I have only eight bottles of single malt open. This means you can expect four single malt reviews in August, as I will be opening a bottle each week. Don’t expect any of these reviews to be of current releases: I have not purchased a bottle of whisky in a long time and probably won’t till the 2024 release of the Laphroaig Cairdeas shows up in Minnesota (not that it sounds very interesting).
Restaurant report-wise it’ll be a weekly diet of Twin Cities metro reports every Tuesday and travel backlog clearing in the second half of the week. And there’ll be a lot of Chinese reports as I have both a pair from the Twin Cities scheduled for this month as well as a whole bunch from San Francisco and Los Angeles. And I might also post a list I’ve been turning over in my head for some time: Twin Cities fine dining restaurants ranked by how often I am likely to want eat at them. Let’s call it The Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation—I’ll try to post it before August is out.
That’s a lot of content! Thank you for keeping it coming; I know it’s a labor of love but it has to fit in among several important commitments.