I don’t think that anybody could possibly mistake me for a real food critic, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for writing a completely useless and unfair commentary about a restaurant. My law student girlfriend (who, incidentally, is nothing more than a rumor these days—if your friend or lover tries to go to law school, do […]

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Poor Romania is one of those countries that couldn’t possibly have chosen a nastier set of historical neighbors. Over the past millennium or so, present-day Romania’s borders have been overrun by invading armies of Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, and Russians, just to name a few of the larger powers. For most of Romanian […]

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If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know that I’m not a typical wannabe food critic. I’m trying to eat food from everywhere because I really like food, but this whole thing is also a social experiment of sorts (I’ll be weaseling my way into many kitchens over the next year or two), […]

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For the most part, I loathe French restaurants in the United States.  I like dingy dives, I love street food, and I despise haughty, overpriced bistros.  Sadly, most French places are either miserably pretentious, or simply out of my price range.  Really, would a working-class Frenchman ever eat in the sorts of French restaurants that […]

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I decided to make this Eurotrash week, which means that I’ve eaten relatively unremarkable food so far–nobody would try to argue that German or Belgian food is likely to be as surprising as, say, Barbadian leadpipe or Liberian palm butter.  But the bathrooms in the German and Belgian places were surprisingly intimate–just the way I […]

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