This week of reviews of sherry cask Laphroaigs began with the 2022 release of the official 10 yo Sherry Oak. That one is a sherry finish. It continued on Wednesday with a 13 yo refill sherry cask, distilled in 1998 and bottled in 2011 by A.D. Rattray. We’ll end the week now with another refill sherry butt filled with spirit distilled in 1998. This is a 15 yo bottled by Signatory for The Whisky Exchange in London. There were quite a few of these casks filled in 1998 bottled around that time. This is from cask 700393. I’ve actually previously reviewed cask 700394. That one was another 13 yo and was released by Van Wees in 2011. My understanding is that a lot of Van Wees’ casks came from Signatory in those days and so it’s not a surprise that the numbers are adjacent. Anyway, I really liked that 13 yo—and, for that matter, I quite liked cask 700348 as well, which was also bottled by Van Wees. Will another two years of aging make this 15 yo even better than those two? If only things worked that way. Anyway, I opened this bottle earlier this week and so I know that it’s certainly not a disappointment. At 60.8% abv and almost 10 years in the bottle, however, that first pour was a bit tight. And so these notes are being taken from the third pour. Continue reading
Bukchon Son Mandu, Insadong (Seoul, March 2023)
Back to Seoul. I’ve previously posted a look at my dinner on my second night there—it featured excellent haemultang at Wonjo Agujjim—and lunch later in the week at Namdaemun Market’s kalguksu alley. Here now is a report on the place where I ate my first meal a little after arrival at my hotel: Bukchon Son Mandu in Insadong. The temptation to lie down and take a nap was strong but I resisted and went out to wander and try to get my bearings near the hotel. Walking through the narrow alleys off Insadong-gil I happened on Bukchon Son Mandu. I liked the food well enough that I also stopped in there for a small snack after lunch on my second day. And for reasons of convenience it was also the place where I ate my last lunch before heading to the airport. Here is a look at the restaurant and everything I ate. Continue reading
Laphroaig 13, 1998 (A.D. Rattray)
Having begun this week of reviews of sherried Laphroaigs with a recent official release (the 2022 release of the Sherry Oak), let me now get back to my annoyingly untimely ways. This is a 13 yo that was distilled in 1998 and bottled by A.D. Rattray in 2011 from a single sherry butt. I purchased it from the Whisky Exchange in August 2011, opened it in September and finished it in August 2012, just over half a year before starting this blog. In those days, however, as I’ve mentioned before, it was my standard practice to save 6 oz reference samples from bottles I liked so I could drink them again years down the road. Predictably I forgot about most of these 6 oz samples over the next decade. In recent years I’ve been making an effort to drink them up and now they’re almost all gone. This was one of the few remaining Laphroaig reference samples from that period that I still had. I assumed I’d already reviewed it but it turned out I hadn’t. It was still in very good condition and so here are some notes from the last two ounces. Continue reading
Dim Sum at Yangtze, 2023 (St. Louis Park, MN)
I bring shocking news: we went out to eat dim sum in the Twin Cities. Regular readers of the blog know why this is shocking. It is not a secret that we—my family and I—are not fans of the dim sum available in the Twin Cities metro. Despite what a lot of people will tell you, it’s not really very good—both on its own merits and when compared to what’s available in American cities with large Chinese populations. In fact, you don’t even have to compare the local scene with that in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley to find it lacking; we ate better dim sum in Denver when we lived in Boulder in the early-mid 2000s. In the past, Yangtze in St. Louis Park was the one place we would eat dim sum at from time to time. But our last meal there—back in 2017—was a big disappointment and, given that it’s a 50 minute each way drive for us, we swore off returning. But we needed to be in St. Louis Park at midday on Sunday and as I cast around for a place to eat an early lunch at Yangtze was right there. And so we decided to give it another go. And we kind of liked it. Herewith the details. Continue reading
Laphroaig 10, Sherry Oak, 2022 Release
Even though Laphroaig is my favourite distillery, I’m not sure that I’ve yet done a week of Laphroaig reviews. Well, let’s do one now (and if it turns out I have in fact already done one, then I was only testing you).
I’ll begin with the 2022 release of the Laphroaig 10 Sherry Oak. I’ve previously reviewed the 2021 release—just about a year ago, actually. I quite liked that one. I’d noted in that review that I was going to keep an eye out for it in Minnesota. This plan was foiled—or at least slowed down—by the fact that I barely ever enter liquor stores—or look at their websites—anymore. But in February I did see a bottle on a local shelf and quickly nabbed it. I didn’t have my reading glasses with me at the store and so couldn’t read the bottling code etched near the bottom. When I got home I confirmed it was a 2022 release (the code begins L2). Will I like it as much as the 2021? Let’s see. Continue reading
China Club (Gurgaon, February 2023)
This is not my last restaurant report from our trip to Delhi earlier this year (we were there most of January and returned in early February) but it is a report on our last restaurant meal there. It’s in a genre that is not really my favourite to go eat out in India: fancy Chinese food. I do very much enjoy classic Indian Chinese food (though even that is not very high on my list of priorities in Delhi, usually) but I enjoy the putatively more “authentic” fancier places a little bit less. This because, in my limited experience, they tend to end up neither here nor there. If you have access to better Cantonese or Sichuan or whatever restaurants elsewhere, their Indian counterparts fall very short; and nor do they offer the pleasures of more masala-fied Indian Chinese cooking. That’s been my experience anyway. We ended up at China Club in Gurgaon anyway for complicated reasons—we were taking my parents out to lunch and wherever we went needed to be close to their place and easily navigable with my father’s mobility issues. Here’s what we found. Continue reading
Coming Soon…
We got a blizzard last evening and then a big blast of snow around midnight; so April is already looking good. I’m also back to teaching after being off on sabbatical since last November. You’d think I’d be well rested after the sabbatical but it’s been a crazily hectic few months with travel all over the place. Anyway, all this to say that I am busier right now than I have been in a while and as a result don’t have the coming month mapped out as clearly as I usually do. I have no whisky reviews already completed and ready to go. And while I have a huge backlog of food reports—the last couple from Delhi, a bunch from Goa and a bunch from Seoul—I don’t have any of those prepared either. So, all I can tell you at this point is that in April on the blog I will have some whisky reviews and some food reports. (Oh, I can also tell you that I won’t have any recipes this month either—you should look to my Instagram for those.) Nonetheless, I do invite you, as always, to weigh in on my possible whisky reviews—remember, I do themed weeks these days. If any of the possible themes below interest you, write in to the comments. Continue reading
Kilchoman 11, 2007, ImpEx Cask Evolution
This week of reviews of bourbon cask whiskies has been going rather well. Wednesday’s Teaninich 11 from Berry Bros. & Rudd, at the border of austere and fruity, was very nice indeed. And Monday’s Bowmore 17 from the SMWS was a fruity delight. To close out the week now, I have another 11 yo and it takes us back to Islay. This Kilchoman was distilled in 2007 and matured in an ex-Buffalo Trace bourbon barrel before being bottled for the American importer’s Cask Evolution series. Though the back of the box mentions the fact that Kilchoman’s 100% Islay range uses barley grown and distilled on Islay, I don’t believe this is a 100% Islay bottling. It was distilled from barley peated to a pretty high level of 50 ppm, whereas the 100% Islay line comes in at 20 ppm. Of the ImpEx Cask Evolution releases I’ve tried this is certainly the most staid one. You may recall that my previous review was of a 7 yo that had received a mezcal finish; and before that I’d reviewed an 8 yo that had been doubled matured in port casks. I did like both of those—the port cask more than the mezcal finish—but am looking forward to this one, as my boring opinion is that ex-bourbon Kilchoman is the best Kilchoman. Anyway, let’s see what it’s like. Continue reading
Indian Accent III (Delhi, January 2023)
One of my very favourite meals of 2022 was eaten in Delhi in March: lunch at Indian Accent. That was my second meal at Indian Accent, the first having been eaten several years ago, when they were still in their original Friends Colony location, long before the international acclaim and the opening of branches abroad. Now, Indian Accent is in the swanky Lodhi Hotel (not that the previous location was not swanky as well) and is a mainstay on all those stupid “Best Restaurants in X” lists. I am generally skeptical of those lists but there’s no denying the excellence of the food at Indian Accent. Eight years passed between my first and second meal there, but given how good that second meal last year was, there was no way I was not going back again in January, this time with the missus in tow. Continue reading
Teaninich 11, 2007 (Berry Bros. & Rudd)
I started the week with a bourbon cask Bowmore bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society that I thought was excellent. May as well make bourbon casks the theme for this week. Accordingly, here is a young Teaninich, distilled in 2007 and bottled by Berry Bros. & Rudd in 2019. Mind, these days 11 years is not terribly young for single malt whisky. And I’m sure this was not priced like an 11 yo of days of yore. Or maybe it was— I don’t think the current insanity in the whisky market had yet begun to approach its peak in 2019. Anyway, Berry Bros. & Rudd rarely indicate the cask type on their labels, and this one was no exception. It’s safe to say though—via a look and a quick sniff—that this was an ex-bourbon cask. Though whether first-fill, second-fill or refill is unknown; and the cask’s outturn not being mentioned on the label either, it’s hard to know whether this was a hogshead or a barrel—though perhaps the whisky itself will offer some clues. Anyway, let’s get to it. Continue reading
A Grand Szechuan Check-In (Bloomington, MN)
Here is a quick, somewhat anxious check-in at Grand Szechuan, the Twin Cities metro’s house of Sichuan delights par excellence. Why anxious? Well, late last year—as noted in my annual year-end survey of our meals eaten there—the voluminous menu at Grand Szechuan suddenly shrank. The large “leather”-bound menus were replaced by a somewhat makeshift menu on folded printer paper. I did not see this myself but this was confirmed by a number of people. And a number of favourite dishes were not on that menu. The word was that there were staffing problems that caused this. We left for India shortly thereafter, had a busy February after we got back, and then I was off in Seoul in early March. And so it wasn’t till last week that I finally had a chance to go see for myself where things stood. Here is what I found. Continue reading
Bowmore 17, 2004 (SMWS 3.331)
The first whisky I ever reviewed on the blog was a Bowmore (the lowly Legend of yesteryear), and since then I’ve marked every anniversary of the blog with a Bowmore review. All except for the 10th anniversary this past Friday when I instead posted a look back at the decade on the blog. And so, a few days late, here is the requisite anniversary Bowmore review. This is a Bowmore 17, 2004, bottled by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, and is one of several they’ve released that were distilled on the same day in 2004 and matured in second-fill hogsheads. Indeed, the whole sequence of releases from 3.330 to 3.341 (where 3 refers to the SMWS’ distillery code for Bowmore and the other digits to the release number) are casks that were filled with spirit distilled on February 16, 2004; and almost all of those casks were second-fill hogsheads. Confusingly, this release, 3.331 was put out under two different silly names by the SMWS. Whiskybase shows one with the name “Taken out to sea” and one with the name “Ice cream dusted with chimney soot”. The former was the allocation for the US market and I guess they may have given that a different name—everything else is the same, down to the tasting notes on the label. Fascinating, no? Continue reading
Ten Years of Restaurant Reviews
Please continue to join me as I gaze at my navel. This blog marked its tenth anniversary on Friday. And if it weren’t enough that I posted a long look back at the life of the blog on that day, last night I also posted a brief retrospective of some of the whisky reviews I most enjoyed writing in that time. And this morning I have for you a list of restaurant reviews/reports that I am also particularly fond of (for different reasons). Some are of meals I enjoyed very much; some of meals I enjoyed not at all; and in some the food itself is somewhat beside the point. They’re drawn from across the life of the blog and include reviews from many of the locations I’ve covered: Minnesota, obviously, but also Delhi, Calcutta, the U.K. and Hong Kong; and elsewhere in the US, from Kansas City and New York. Nothing from Los Angeles, but that’s because my L.A reviews are largely functional. The ones I have chosen to highlight in this post have other commentary in them that recommends them. Continue reading
Ten Years of Whisky Reviews
I’d planned to clear out a couple more of Delhi restaurant reports this weekend, but I’m being told that I should do a bit more to commemorate the blog’s 10th anniversary (see Friday’s post for a maudlin recap of the last 10 years). I’ve decided to do this by highlighting some of my posts from the last 10 years. I’m going to begin with a list of 10 whisky reviews; later I’ll post 10 restaurant reviews; 10 recipes; 10 other pieces of food writing; and 10 posts that don’t fall into any of the above categories. I do also have whisky posts that aren’t reviews—but I’ve already highlighted a number of those in Friday’s post. As you’ll see, the reviews I’ve chosen to highlight here are all taken from the first five or six years of the blog’s life—back when this was, as I noted on Friday, decidedly a whisky blog. Indeed, the list slants particularly towards reviews from the first year of the blog. This is not because I didn’t review any whiskies worth remembering after 2018. But I did put a little more effort into the introductions/preambles I wrote in those days; and also, let’s be frank, into the reviews themselves, which were less brief than those from more recent years. Continue reading
Ten Years
The blog turned 10 today. Well, not exactly. If I recall correctly, it went live to the public closer to March 29, 2013—but the first post was dated March 24. The blog began as a whisky blog and for the first several months I posted a whisky review every single day. Ten years later, I can’t believe I kept that up that long (even as I acknowledge that Serge still posts a minimum of 10 booze reviews a day). In those days I was very much a whisky blogger. In that first post, the other subjects I say I might occasionally post about are film, music and books. I have done a little of that over the years but it’s funny that the thing I don’t mention is food. Funny, because by now this is probably almost entirely a food blog in the eyes of most of my readers—and I now have far more readers than I did in the early years of the blog. I can’t say I had any idea when I started out of how long I would blog but since 10 is a nice round number, let me take the opportunity to look back a little (and then a little bit ahead). Continue reading
Talisker 11, Special Release 2022
This week of reviews of official Taliskers began on Monday with a 9 yo hand-fill cask that was available at the distillery in 2022. It was matured in “rejuvenated” red wine casks. I did not like that one at all. It continued yesterday with the 2021 release of the classic 10 yo. I liked that quite a bit more than the 9 yo, though not as much as I had earlier releases. Today I have for you a review of an 11 yo that was also released in 2022, albeit in much wider release than the distillery hand-fill. This was part of Diageo’s Special Release slate for 2022. All their Special Release bottles now seem to have some sort of animal imagery on their labels and this Talisker is no different. It sports a psychedelic cephalopod on the front and a fair bit of marketing malarkey on the back (the release itself is named “The Lustrous Creature of the Depths”). The important things to know are that this was put together from first-fill bourbon casks and was bottled at 55.1%. In the US the average price being asked for this—as per WineSearcher—is $144. Not surprisingly, there’s still a fair bit of it about. And not just in the US. The Incheon airport duty free stores had lots of it a couple of weeks ago (along with lots of most of the rest of the 2022 Special Release). I can only hope Diageo is having a tough time flogging these overpriced whiskies. That’s not to say that the whisky itself is not good. I opened this bottle right after buying it (for quite a bit less than $144) and liked it very much from the get-go. Here now are my notes. Continue reading
Talisker 10, 2021 Release
This is a week of reviews of officially bottled Taliskers. Once upon a time, officially bottled Taliskers were pretty much the only kind there were; in recent years, however, some young casks have emerged from indie bottlers. But that is neither here nor there. The week began with a 9 yo distillery hand-fill from a “rejuvenated” red wine cask. I did not like it. I did not like it at all. Today’s whisky is one year older and is the classic 10 yo—a whisky that I once recommended without reservation to anyone looking for a reasonably priced single malt of good quality. This quality has slipped over time—see the transition from the 2009 release I reviewed in 2014 to the 2016 release that I reviewed in 2018—but the Talisker 10 has remained a solid malt. And the price too has remained reasonable—I got this for less than $50 in Minnesota (compare with the Springbank 10). Well, as I say that it remains a solid malt, I remember that it’s been a while since I last tried it. Today’s review is of a bottle from the 2021 release. I’m not sure when Diageo’s brain trust decided to mess with the label design but, as I noted on Twitter when I purchased this bottle last year, they’ve really hit it with the ugly stick. How about what’s inside? Let’s see. Continue reading