philadining

Desi Village in King of Prussia is really good for Pakistani/North Indian. It's a little fancier and pricer than most of the places I like, but the people are very nice, and the food is good. I love the Papri Chat, all the tandoori stuff including breads, and the bengan bartha is the best I've ever had, really smooth and smoky. 145 South Gulph Road King of Prussia, PA 1940 desi-village.com And just north a bit on 202, in the plaza with Tower Records and the Acme, is Jaipur. I just keep forgetting it's there, tucked at the back of the plaza. 336 DeKalb Pike, King of Prussia, PA 19406 http://www.jaipurindia.com/

1) apple with apple brandy (sorbetto): no real brandy flavor, but eerily exactly like a nice granny smith apple, right down to the fleshy texture and bits of skin. Really good. 2) cilantro and lime (sorbetto): I had to get this because of an odd experience I had at Pod just shortly after it opened. Some friends and I sat at the bar, and I asked if they could make a mojito. These drinks weren't quite all the rage yet, so the bartender seemed a little unsure, then decided he could. All looked good, he was squeezing limes and working something with sugar in a muddling cup, but the taste was a little odd. He and I both figured it out simultaneously: he had accidentally used cilantro rather than mint. It wasn't that good of a drink (he replaced it with a proper one), but it did lead to a good inside joke about parsley mojitos.... But I'm happy to say the combo makes for a better sorbetto, not quite as good as the mojito sorbetto from a couple of weeks ago, but the cilantro and lime was nice and sour and refreshing. Thumbs up.

I had some really good South Indian food at Devi in Exton on saturday. They do a buffet for lunch every day, and at at dinner only on friday and saturday nights. This particular night they were serving only the buffet, and it had a special Tamil theme. Devi is a vegetarian restaurant, and serves a number of dishes I don't recall seeing very often at other places around Philly. I don't know if it's always buffet only on the weekends. Devi makes a wide variety of Dosa and Uthappam, the rice and lentil crepes stuffed or topped with various things. I was initially disappointed that there was only the buffet because I was really hankering for a masala dosa. I was thrilled when someone came by and asked if I wanted a dosa, I think I could have gotten any kind. A few minutes later a nice, fresh, crispy dosa filled with potato and onions arrived, at no extra charge. The buffet itself was not especially lavish, but it did have a nice variety, including a few things I hadn't ever seen before. Everything I had was very good, especially the dark brown, rich, mushroom curry and the cauliflower with peppers. I also liked a polenta-ish thing that I couldn't see the name for, but it had a nice creamy texture, studded with nuts and raisins. Oh, and the vegetable kurma, and..... Sadly, there was one chaffing dish set out by itself, seemingly the highlight of the buffet, and shortly after i sat down, there was a big crash - apparently it wasn't balanced too well, and a customer had accidentally tipped it over onto the floor. It was never refilled, so I don't know what it was. They had Sambar and Rasam soups, which were both good, especially for dipping a doughy iddly. There were Mudhu Vada savory donuts, pakoras, little mini poofy Puri bread, a pulau, a couple more curries... lots to eat. I really liked the wide variety of chutneys, not just mint and tamarind, but also sweet onion, tomato, mango pickle, more. It was nicely different from most of the other places I go, and quite a value: the best $11 dinner I've had in a long time. I'm always reluctant to fall back on this old cliche, but almost everyone eating there was Indian, which is a little unusual out in the burbs, so I'll take it as an indication of some measure of authenticity. Regardless, it was good, and different.

There's still a good pile of the 93 Burgess Cab in West Chester. I lightened their load a little, but there's more. I didn't see any of the really swanky Chapoutier, and it's probably just as well, I have purchasing restraint issues.... But I couldn't resist a bottle of the more reasonable "Les Granits." Not to be snotty, but jeeze, the store looked like a bomb went off in it. They're in the midst of an expansion, and that's welcome, but there was dust and detritus all over most the wine bottles, chunks of debris on the floor near the entrance, and around the small display of premium wines. I know renovation is messy, but would it have killed them to put a drop cloth over the wines when they pulled the ceiling down? Or, I don't know, sweep the floor? I guess it could be good, you can get the cellar-aged look, so you can pretend that you pulled the bottle from your private reserve, blowing the dust off for impressive effect.

hmmmm, new drink special at the SSOH?

I LOVE the expression on the guy's face on their website's home page... About 20 years ago, I recall some folks in the biz cattily dismissing Ulana's as a vanity project, more of a hobby than a business. I have no idea if that is or was true, it's hard to imagine keeping a place open THAT long if nobody was eating there! But as the original post mentioned, I don't recall ever seeing a review, or ever talking to anyone who ate there. In the last several years, I think their focus has been more on being a nightclub, or renting the space out to promoters, featuring everything from jazz to Goa Trance DJs. Of course, none of that has any bearing on whether the food's any good. Rich is right, the menu looks pretty 1980s. And Katie's right, the chef has surely changed 473 times since Rich waited tables. So, who knows? Has anybody here eaten anything there in the last decade or two? (And Katie, who can blame you? Dance instructors? feh! Stat TAs at Penn were famous the world over for being smokin' hot. A standard deviation or two above the mean, if you know what I mean. )

Is it just me, or does the Steak and Ale menu not seem to offer escargot, per se? I'm all for poetic license, but... "ESCARGOT Baked mushroom caps in a garlic butter sauce, topped with shredded Parmesan cheese." http://www.steakandale.com/menu_dinner.htm or do they put snails on top of the mushroom caps? I've got nothing against the Steak and Ale, but I couldn't help wondering how much escargot they move on a regular basis. But you're right, even pencil erasers in garlic butter sauce with parmesan would be pretty good.

This is a little old, but I wrote about it on my site. From what sockii posted, it sounds like not much has changed, which is a good thing in my book. I liked it, but just haven't been back in a while for no particular reason....

location, location, location! Really, it's mostly a matter of them being pretty easy to get to, and open late. With some good reports from their other locations, I had been hoping for some good, truly smoky, barbecue without driving to the Northeast. I agree with your assessment, I overall liked the food and setting better at The Smoked Joint, so I'll probably go there more often, but others have had the opposite reaction. Sadly I think both places might be a little inconsistent.... I was hoping the dryness/doneness issues were just opening jitters affecting the South Street Tommy Gunn's, but if you had the same problem in Manayunk, that's does not bode well. Again, for what it's worth, the spareribs at Tommy Gunn's were really great the day I was there.

It's another one of those crazy city ordinances: all restaurants in Philly must be named after characters or locations in Rocky movies. You might remember his opponent in Rocky 34, whose nickname was "The Striped Bass", his manager in Rocky 73 was Maury Moto, etc... If you look hard enough, they're all in those movies somewhere.

Bocce Pizza, i think it was mentioned upthread a bit, and yeah, that was good stuff. There was one out in Suburban Square for a while too, and that one seemed to drift in quality, but I generally had good luck with the duck pizza. I got one once that was topped with more rosemary than duck, and that was a little hard to take, but I'm pretty forgiving if there's a wood-fired crust and duck in the same general vicinity.

Yeah, great report, thanks for taking such good notes! Just curious, were they picking the beverages for you at Morimoto? And overall did you think they worked well? And what did that cost? Thanks again.

I was amused by the menu's monday Blue Plate Special of "Chicken-Fried Chicken". Where are the french-fried french fries? I've seen this chicken thing on menus before, and I assume it's a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to chicken-fried steak, which is a steak fried like one fries a chicken. But it seems to me that a chicken fried like one fries a chicken, could be safely referred-to as "fried chicken." And I'll join the chorus saying that steakhouses are pretty far down on my list of destinations. But I like that the menu offers Coke in 8oz bottles, in my opinion the ideal way to drink a Coke.

I did, but they brought a second order of shrimp with lemon grass instead. ← If fact, no matter what we ordered, they brought shrimp with lemon grass. Actually they just did that once, but it was interesting to observe them not offering to fix it when it was brought to their attention.I posted my recollections over in the Chinatown Help topic here. I cruelly impugned Gary's character, mostly because it was so amusing to observe his indignation about his order of Soft Noodles with Crab. There didn't seem to be much crab in it, although, in the restaurant's defense, it's easy to lose crab amidst tangles of noodles, so there might have been a little more than appeared. But the dish was expensive for something not loaded with crab. The noodles themselves were good though. We did wimp out and skipped the pork blood, and the duck tongue, and the intestines, but the sheer variety of the menu is pretty impressive.

An unruly crowd of hooligans descended on Rising Tide (937 Race St) on thurs, and amazingly, the place is still standing... We didn't make it through all 300 items on the menu, and due to a bit too much wine (and unquestionably, too much white zin) I'm not sure I'll be able to recall everything. But overall, everything was pretty good, a few things were really good, and it was really affordable. The seafood Tom Yum soup was well-received, but I'll leave it to someone who won't die after eating a shrimp to describe. We continued with a pile of various "snacks" a few orders of fried and steamed dumplings, mini eggrolls, steamed buns (as in soup dumplings, not bao) and some meat on a stick. I thought all of these were fine, nothing particularly thrilling, although the beef on a stick was surprisingly good. We learned that Monsignor Fentoni will eat anything on a stick. I find this less disturbing than I should. The steamed buns weren't (at least mine wasn't) all that soupy, but were still OK. I think this is one of those things that a place has to specialize in to get really right. We tried to adhere to the time-honored tradition of everyone ordering his or her own entree, and then getting none of it as it rounds the table. Beef Chow fun was really good. We should have ordered three of those. Soft noodles with crab had a really nice chewy, soft texture, but Gary ate all the crab before any of us could get any. He'll deny it, but didn't Shakespeare say something about protestething too much? Shrimp and scallops with lemongrass was so good we got it twice, even though one of them was supposed to be squid. As you might have guessed, I didn't try either of them. Fish curry was very nice, more like a mild Indian curry than Thai. I wasn't in the mood for the Salmon, so I'll let someone else describe it. The whole deep fried striped bass was very good, crispy, with a sweet and sour sauce. The threatened chopstick fight over the cheeks dissolved in a puddle of white zin, and I think they were forgotten. Braised shortribs in a clay pot was really tasty, with a dark, rich, sweet sauce. Pork belly, also in a clay pot, was drier, but artery-firming good. Roast Pork and Chinese sausage on rice is apparently baked to order, because it took about 20 minutes (they warned us). It had that great sweet-salty-fatty thing that characterizes most things worth eating. We were all a little pissed that someone refused to open his bottle of Beaujolais, but we got by with a few other wines. I'm waffling between the Sept Grains and the Weimer Gewurtz as my faves with this food. Not content with the levels of pork fat in our systems, we made a damp pilgrimage to Capogiro, and got the cholesterol counts back up to where they should be. Overall, a seriously fun evening. The food was very good, and there are about 204 more things on the menu that we didn't try. I'm not sure that Rising Tide displaced any of my previous faves in Chinatown, but I'd go back, I liked almost everything I had.

Olive Oil Gelato... it was, well, oily. And a little olivey. I liked it. Pistachio was nice too, even though I ordered Hazelnut. But the winner was the Mojito Sorbetto. Yowza!

Or would they be at the top of the suckosity scale?

There's some evidence of a few left here: http://www.pudgiespizza.com/ including downtown Rochester, Elmira, Horseheads and Mansfield. There was a time when there were gazillions of them, I assume it's the same company, and I think this -ies spelling are the ones I'm remembering. I'm pretty confident this is it, because the psychopath who designed their website automatically redirects you to an obnoxious mp3 of their "...good-time pizza and subs." jingle. But there also seem to still be some in Canandaigua, Bath, Cortland, other places, but not mentioned on that web page. Has there been a split in the Pudgie's empire? Renegade separatists? A shadow Pudgies? http://www.pudgiespizza.com/delicious/about.html doesn't really say much... Wish the mystery were worth all this effort!

Well, get ready for even longer lines, Marcus Samuelsson has it in his list of "best meal deals" in the April Food and Wine mag.

I'm with you, when I was 10, if a sheet of pizza from Pudgie's was involved, that was a good party, man! But it very well may have been objectively a culinary crime. I just had a pizza from (local chain) Pontillo's about a week ago, and it was decent quality and tasty and all, but of that squishy doughy style. Chester Cab touts its Chicago style stuffed pizza, is that what people liked, Gordon, or their regular? I like deep-dish pizza, but again, different animal. I never thought of it before, but I wonder how pervasive the "sheet" phenomenon is? Up in Rochester it's pretty common to be able to order a small or a large or a sheet, maybe a half sheet of anything. Of course this is absurd to anyone who values a Neopolitan crust, but the indigenous pizza is almost half-way to Sicilian so that crust can really be whatever shape and size you want. Of course, I've been ruined by Patsy's in East Harlem, and the Lombardi's in Philly, so almost everything else is kind of disappointing, but every once in a while I regress to that childlike state DeVeaux mentioned "when any pizza you got was good."

Dr Fenton: I had always wondered what caused drunkenness, thanks for the medical explanation! I had always suspected that the food was at fault. Exactly! I've been mystified about why the finer brewpubs and bars featuring local craft beers don't offer to serve in funnels. I mean, frat guys drink a LOT of beer, so they'd know the best way to appreciate it, wouldn't they? I've heard that an occasional shot of hard liquor interspersed with the beer will jump-start the liver a bit and prevent further intoxication. At least I think that's how it goes... it's all a little foggy...

Only if you order them from a store in Rochester - Calabrisella's in Gates. ← or White-Hots.com

Thanks for those tips Gordon, if you folks do your test again this year, can you post your findings here?

Nasty?!? How can you describe a classic component in a "Garbage Plate" as "nasty"? I love them white hots. But back on topic, I sadly can't think of any especially great pizza around Rochester, where I grew up. Most all I have come across have been decent, doughy, comforting things that look like pizzas, but the prevailing aesthetic does seem to be thick, soft, bready crusts with bushels of toppings. That's not without appeal, but it's not really the same species as tends to get discussed in the pizza threads here. I get back there often, so I too would love to know if anyone has a good pizza source in that vicinity...

I was charmed enough by my late-night sandwich that I went back to Tommy Gunn's about 14 hours later for a bigger meal, and my review is mixed. First, the good news: The spare ribs, fabulous; baked beans, really great; corn salad, tasty and refreshing; real sugar cola, nostalgically bad-for-you-good; prices, very reasonable. On the other hand, baby back ribs, pulled pork and brisket were all dry. Dousing with the good tangy sauce helped a bit, but couldn't save the baby backs which were just WAY overdone to the point of being crunchy. "Spicy Collard Greens" weren't at all spicy, but still pretty decent, although I prefer greens with a bit of pork in them. Coleslaw was fine, but nothing special. Cornbread was mushy and blah. But the whole operation was a bit of a disaster on sunday afternoon. At the register, they didn't have any change, and were pleading with customers to give them ones. We ordered one of their "Premium Sides," the deep-fried macaroni, but were told they had run out. That's no big deal, but several orders came out to the parties that sat down just barely after us. The table next to us had to chase down the staff who had delivered one order of ribs but had just forgotten about the other person's food, and a couple of sides. This reminded me that they had failed to deliver the slaw and beans that came with my sampler platter. I'm not sure what was going on at the next table over, but I heard a staff guy saying, "right, my bad, sorry about that" several times. We clearly said that we were dining-in but were served our food in to-go styrofoam. But you know, for some reason, I didn't really mind any of that. Staff was eager-to-please even if they were frazzled, we eventually got what we ordered, and the food was good, even if not consistently well-executed. It's hard not to make comparisons to The Smoked Joint, even though the vibe is very different. Of course much of this just comes down to personal preferences, but here's my take: Ribs - I give a slight edge to Tommy Gunn's spare ribs, skip the baby backs (probably a good policy everywhere.) Pulled pork I liked a bit better at TSJ. Brisket I liked LOTS more at TSJ, it was much moister and more tender. Beans were very different at each place, but I liked them both, so I call that a draw. TSJ's are sweet with big chunks of meat. TG's are more soupy, almost like an indian dal, with little strands of meat, and more hearty. Cornbread is much better at TSJ. I don't love the actual physical setting of TSJ much, but it's still more comfortable than TG's tiny, basic, cold seating area. Service was a bit more together at TSJ, but then TG's South Street location is still pretty new. The prices at Tommy Gunn's are much more reasonable, but the portions at TSJ, especially the sides, are bigger. I'll be going back to both places.