Hot Grainz V (St. Paul, MN)

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I’d thought I’d post this Twin Cities report on Thursday after getting back to Minnesota; but, thanks to a two-hour flight delay, it’s coming to you instead from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam where I have run out of things to do.

This report on lunch at our current favourite Thai restaurant in the Twin Cities, Hot Grainz, represents the end of my Twin Cities winter backlog. It’s not quite a current report, though. We ate this meal a week after returning from our spring travels in mid-June. It’ll probably take till mid-September, at least, before I’m fully caught up. Fascinating, I know. Continue reading →

Swati Snacks 3 (Bombay, March 2026)

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After three first-time reports from Bombay restaurants (Pradeep’s Gomantak Bhojanalay, Sarangaa, and Maaslli) from my five-week sojourn in the city in March and April of this year, here is the first repeat. As I’ve mentioned before, I eat at Swati Snacks every time I am in Bombay (see my previous reports here and here) and, indeed, I ate at the Tardeo mothership on my second day in the city in March. Two of the students on my program had arrived a few days before the others and I took them along with me to introduce them to this great Bombay institution. I’m glad to report that they enjoyed it very much. Here are some details. Continue reading →

Ben Nevis 18, 1996 (Whiskybase)

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Another week, another Whiskybase release. Unlike last week’s Littlemill 25 or the previous week’s Caol Ila 30, however, this was not a release under their Archives label. Instead, it’s one of the regular Whiskybase labels used for releases that commemorate milestones reached on their invaluable database. This Ben Nevis 18 was bottled in February 2015 to mark the 60,000th entry in Whiskybase. That number is now much, much higher (though I can’t recall if I have any of the later commemorative releases—I’m away from my whisky lair right now). This was from a single sherry butt and the colour of the whisky suggests it might have been an oloroso butt (or at least an European oak cask). Ben Nevis, like Littlemill, has one of Scotland’s most idiosyncratic profiles. Like Littlemill, its spirit is usually quite fruity but, also like Littlemill, the fruit is often intermingled with other notes that are not to everyone’s taste. I’m generally a big fan and so am hoping for good things from this bottle. Let’s see how it goes. Continue reading →

Laut (New York, October 2025)

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Back to the missus and my trip to New York, last October. When last seen in the city, we were eating Italian dinner at the since-closed Foul Witch with a very old friend of mine. Lunch was with someone I’ve known for a much shorter time and, until this lunch, only online, Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at NYU and a renowned scholar of the culture and sociology of immigrant cuisines and restaurants in the United States. We’d interacted online for several years prior and had talked about getting together in person for a while—it finally happened on this trip, and a very nice encounter it was. He had asked us what kinds of foods we were most interested in eating and, keeping our other meal plans in mind, we had suggested South East Asian food of one kind or the other. He then furnished a list of possibilities, from which we chose Laut, a Malaysian restaurant located right off Union Square. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Gwanghwamun Gukbap III (Seoul, May 2026)

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This week’s Seoul report is a quick look at dinner at a Seoul restaurant I’ve reported on twice before: Gwanghwamun Gukbap. As with all the other Seoul restaurants I’ve reported on so far from this trip (here, here, and here), Gwanghwamun Gukbap is within walking distance of where we were staying, near Gwanghwamun Square. As the name suggests, the restaurant’s signature dish is gukbap (pork broth/soup with rice), but that’s not what we’ve been going back there for since we first ate there as a family in February 2024. That’s not because the gukbap is not very good; it is. It’s because we are soondae enthusiasts more than we are gukbap enthusiasts and Gwanghwamun Gukbap’s soondae is truly outstanding. We loved it when we ate it again in July 2025 and we loved it yet again on this visit. But soondae wasn’t the only thing we ate. Read on for more details. Continue reading →

The Sunday Buffet at Homi (St. Paul, March 2026)

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Here is the last of my Twin Cities backlog from the start of the year. The federal government’s siege of Minnesota—and particularly the Twin Cities—during the first two months of the year had transformed life in the state. Hispanics were among the groups most targeted by ICE and if this meant that restaurants and other businesses that rely on Hispanic labour were among those hit hardest by this assault, it meant that Mexican and other Hispanic restaurants were hit really, really hard. Most shut down for most of that period as both employees and diners stayed away for fear of being caught up in ICE’s terroristic raids. As February came to an end things began to ease up and the restaurants began to re-open. Among the first to start back up was Homi, in St. Paul, one of our favourite Mexican restaurants in the state. I saw their announcement on Facebook of their reopening on March 1 with the Sunday lunch buffet they’d started last year and sent the call out to our usual dining crew. A large group of us showed up that day to welcome them back to operation and also to eat some very good food. Here’s a belated look. Continue reading →

Maaslli I & II (Bombay, March 2026)

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The first thing I did after settling into my flat in Bombay in late March was fire up Google Maps to see if there were any interesting restaurants within easy walking range. It turned out there were very few. One, however, caught my eye: Maaslli. I looked it up and discovered that it is a seafood restaurant specializing in the food of the GSB (Gaud Saraswat Brahmin) community—yes, in India even restaurants have caste-specific identities. And all the reviews I read of it were raves. And what’s more, of the two locations the one within 15 minutes walk of me was the original. And so that is where I ate dinner on my first night in Bombay on this trip. And it was such a fantastic meal that I went back there for dinner again a couple of nights later. And then for two lunches later in the trip. Here first is an account of the first two meals—I’ll post a report on the two lunches in a few weeks. Continue reading →

Littlemill 25, 1988 (Archives)

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I returned to whisky reviewing last week with a 2012 release from Whiskybase under their Archives label: this Caol Ila 30, 1982. Here now is a review of another Archives release, this one a little younger and bottled a couple of years later.

As I’ve noted before, the long-defunct Littlemill distillery did not have a very strong reputation—putting it mildly—when it was active. However, casks of spirit distilled there in the late 1980s and early 1990s and allowed by the vagaries of business history to mature longer than was probably ever intended quickly developed a reputation for fruity excellence when parcels began to be released by various independent bottlers in the early-mid 2010s. Whiskybase’s Archives releases of some of these casks played no small role in the rehabilitation of the distillery’s reputation after its demise. I’ve reviewed some of these before as I have some from other bottlers. Just last year I reviewed a Littlemill 24, 1989 from Archives and a Littlemill 22, 1989 from Glen Fahrn. Both were excellent, especially the 22 yo. Will this 25 yo distilled in 1988 be as good? Let’s see. Continue reading →

Foul Witch (New York, October 2025)

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Yes, I’ve posted reports before on restaurant meals eaten a long time before; this post is, however, a signal achievement for me: it’s a report on a meal eaten not just nine months ago but at a restaurant that closed eight months ago: Foul Witch in Manhattan. There is no utility whatsoever to this report. You are welcome.

You may recall that the missus and I were in New York City for a weekend last October (I’ve previously reported on two meals from that trip, at L’Industrie and Theodora). We had wanted to eat a nice Italian meal on that trip and when I’d consulted some trusted friends who live in the city, Foul Witch came up as one of the few places at the intersection of our budget, desired quality of food and drink, and the likelihood of our being able to get a reservation. And so I made that reservation after drinks with a bunch of old food forum friends at Bar Goto in the East Village, the missus and I walked a couple of blocks to meet another old friend and his partner at Foul Witch. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Hanilkwan (Seoul, May 2026)

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Hanilkwan, established in 1939, is one of Seoul’s oldest and most-storied restaurants. They are credited with bringing aspects of Korean royal cuisine into the mainstream and also for inventing or at least popularizing Seoul-style bulgogi—in which the thinly-sliced beef is cooked in a hot domed pan with the juices/broth pooling along the sides. Originally founded as Hwaseonok, they adopted the current name—which literally means “Korea’s Best Restaurant”—after WW2 when Japanese colonialism ended. Their original location was then destroyed during the Korean war, during which time the restaurant had relocated to Busan. After their return to Seoul they built a new location in Jongno and enjoyed a long heyday as one of the city’s premier restaurants, opening several branches. That new main location too eventually fell, to redevelopment this time, and now their main branch is located in tony Apgujeong, with a few more scattered around the city. The Gwanghwamun branch is located just a brief walk from where we were putting up and it is there that we repaired to for a nice Mother’s Day meal. Continue reading →

Dario (Minneapolis, February 2026)

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Here is this week’s Twin Cities report, only a day and a half late. I’m still working on my backlog, which means this report is of a meal eaten not recently but back at the end of February. After nearly two months, the federal government’s siege of Minnesota had finally begun to ease a little and so we decided to keep our dinner reservation at Dario.

Dario opened in the spring of 2024 to a fair bit of local attention. This ranged from a rave review from Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl in MSP Magazine to a more measured take from Jon Cheng, the Star-Tribune‘s then-restaurant critic. The two reviews are emblematic in a way of the tensions of the local media’s coverage of the Twin Cities’ food scene. One—not always generically distinguishable from a chef’s profile or a press release—promised faultless dishes in a restaurant that represents the new, the happening; the other described a number of dishes that often looked better than they tasted, but because this is Minnesota—or perhaps because of editorial intervention—still gave it a “Highly Recommended” rating. Between all that cognitive dissonance and reports of a deafeningly loud dining room, we didn’t get around to eating there till almost two years later. Here’s how it went.

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Manipuri Chak-Shang (Delhi, December 2025)

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On Sunday I posted the last of my restaurant reports from my truncated trip to Southern California in December (dim sum at the Cerritos branch of Lunasia). Here now is my last restaurant report proper from my trip to Delhi earlier that month. I say “last restaurant report proper” because I may post an odds and ends roundup at some point in the next few weeks.

This meal took me back to my favourite place to eat at in Delhi: Humayunpur, the South Delhi neighbourhood/village that has in the last decade and more become one of the major hubs of North East Indian life in Delhi. I had eaten there with a friend just a few days prior to this meal. That was an excellent Naga meal. As we were walking around after I noticed a place I didn’t remember seeing before: Manipuri Chak Shang (which literally means Manipuri restaurant or eating place). One thing led to another and I was soon eating lunch there as well. This time I was on my own. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

Caol Ila 30, 1982 (Archives)

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Do not be alarmed: this is a whisky review. This used to be a whisky blog once, you know. That was before I began to lose interest in the whisky world (though not in drinking whisky itself) and before my whisky readership—never large—lost interest in me. The former, as I’ve noted before, had to do with a rapidly accelerating disenchantment with the state of the industry. Key drivers of this disenchantment were the drop in the quality of whisky available on the market—especially as many indies began to be squeezed out—and the simultaneous rise in prices for what would once have been considered very young whisky. I more or less stopped buying whisky several years ago now. By that I mean that I stopped buying whisky in my frenzied manner of old; I still purchase the occasional bottle of an old favourite or three. Mostly, I am now drinking down my stores of good whisky purchased in that time of frenzy at very good prices. Such, for example, is this Caol Ila 30 that was released by Whiskybase under their Archives label in 2012. How much did I pay for it then? My spreadsheet tells me it was $148. Those of you who are still active buyers of single malt whisky can tell me what kind of whisky that would get me in today’s market (I don’t even keep track of those things anymore). Alright, enough melancholy talk: let’s get to the notes! Continue reading →

Dim Sum at Lunasia, Cerritos (Los Angeles, December 2025)

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Here is my last restaurant report from my visit to Los Angeles—or more correctly, to Southern California in December. Usually, I have a lot more reports from these trips but I had to cut my stay short, leave the family and frantically return to Delhi. On Christmas morning, however, we went out for dim sum. At the end of my last dim sum report from the region I had said that on future trips we would make the trek out to the San Gabriel Valley to eat dim sum. This not because that meal—at Lunasia’s Torrance location—was bad but because it was not in the same league as at the SGV all-stars, including the Lunasia mothership in Alhambra. But on this trip we ended up anyway at another of their satellite locations, this time in Cerritos. The prospect of driving all the way to the SGV from Seal Beach and then waiting for 2+ hours for a table on Christmas did not appeal, you see. As it turned out, we still had to wait at the Cerritos location as well but at least it was for only about an hour. Continue reading →

Tosokchon Samgyetang (Seoul, May 2026)

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Here is this week’s Seoul report. It is of a meal at a restaurant we’d wanted to eat at on our longer stay in February/March 2024 but had failed to do so: Tosokchon Samgyetang. We had wanted to eat there because we are big fans of samgyetang, the stew/soup of chicken stuffed with rice, ginseng root, jujubes etc. and Tosokchon Samgyetang is a renowned purveyor of the titular dish; also, they were/are located within walking distance of the serviced apartment we put up at on these longer stays. Why then did we fail to eat there in 2024? Who knows? The important thing is that we ate there on this trip; and it did not disappoint. Herewith a quick look at the meal. Continue reading →

Pho Tempo IV (Burnsville, MN, Winter ’25/’26)

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I’d said I would have a Twin Cities restaurant report up on Wednesday and there’s still 15 minutes to go till Thursday in Minnesota. Never call me a liar again!

I’m now closing in on my Twin Cities metro area backlog from the winter. After this one, there will only be two more to go, I think. This report from Burnsville’s Pho Tempo actually encompasses two meals: one I ate by myself in November ’25 and another with the entire family and a couple of friends in February of this year. The first was eaten on the go after a quick shopping stop at Saigon Market—inside which Pho Tempo is located; the second was the reason for the trip. I clarify this in case you think I mean that Pho Tempo is a place to eat if you’re going to Saigon Market for groceries; in fact, it’s one of our favourite Vietnamese restaurants in the Twin Cities metro. Continue reading →

Draavin Canteen (Gurgaon, Dec 2025)

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Draavin Canteen opened in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi a couple of years ago under the name Dakshin Canteen and quickly made a name for their South Indian menu featuring both vegetarian and non-vegetarian food. I read a number of enticing reviews etc. of it online but never managed to make it there. In the second half of last year, however, they opened a branch in Gurgaon, which has been my home base in the Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) since late-2021. With the new location a mere 20 minutes away from my parents’ flat, finding people to go eat there together with became a much easier proposition. And so on my trip in December it was high on my list. I descended on them in a party of five for lunch a few days after arrival. My expectations were high and I’m sorry to say they weren’t quite met. Here are some details. Continue reading →