Food

I can’t think of anything more Sicilian than olive oil cake and blood oranges. This Easter, I went looking for something to do with blood oranges, as they are at farmers’ markets in Los Angeles at the moment. They are …

  In 1999, after a decade long frustrating search, Gordon Sumner and his wife found a 650 acre estate on a hill in Tuscany, Il Palagio.  Now this has little interest to you until I tell you that this man’s …

In my last column, we opened the wine book on the big, stately and beautiful wine country of Sonoma and stretched our legs at Jordan Winery, the 1,200 acre Bordeaux style winery and vineyard just north of Healdsburg.  This week …

  All people love Italian food, but what makes the Italian cuisine so famous and renown?  Fresh products and simple cooking methods (most of the times). These are the reasons behind the popularity of Italian food!   If you are …

  With the waters of the Adriatic lapping its coastline, Friuli Venezia-Giulia’s sparkling sea affords a bounty of fresh seafood, including a species of very large shrimp, almost tiny lobsters, not found in American waters. Having just returned from a …

  There’s something remarkable going on at Bistro West and West Steak and Seafood in Carlsbad.  It’s excellence aligned, with top tier wine presentations and food unequaled in freshness and taste on the restaurant landscape.   In a way it’s …

On my first few visits to Montalcino, I would pass a little closed door in one of the walls of the village.  I was never able to catch it open to learn what was behind this mysterious door. Finally a …

  Well that was fast!  What with San Diego’s new restaurants, resorts that were being bought and sold then re-made, wine bars that sprouted up on virtually every urban block and wine events doubling in number, what’s a wine writer …

Bologna: la grassa, la dotta, la rossa. Apt nicknames for the capital of Emilia-Romagna, which boasts a rich culinary tradition (grassa meaning fat), the oldest university in the Western world (hence dotta: learned), red roofs and left-leaning politics (as in …

Big, stately and beautiful are the first descriptors that come to mind when recalling my trip to Sonoma Wine Country recently.  So big, it cannot be limited to one column. It demands a two part recollection.   After all, Sonoma …