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 →

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 →

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 →