Laine Doss

Chicken and waffles at Emeril's

​There are few people in the world who are so famous that they don't need a last name - Cher, Madonna, Gaga and.....Emeril!  Known as much for his catch phrases "Bam" and "Kick it up a notch" as his food, Emeril is a television celebrity and a personality, but deep down, he's really a chef (and a great one at that).

Though Emeril and New Orleans are sometimes considered one and the same, Emeril Lagasse was born in Massachusetts and attended Johnson & Wales University in Providence.  1982 was when Emeril really took over New Orleans, when he replaced Chef Paul Prudhomme as Executive Chef of Commander's Palace.

On a recent trip to New Orleans, Clean Plate Charlie was invited to take a culinary tour of Emeril's world, visiting two of three of Emeril's New Orleans restaurants, as well as Commander's Palace, where the magic started.

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Nicole Danna

​Ruth Berman and Mike Arra love beer. So much so that the two busy Boynton Beach-based chiropractors decided to make a second living out of it.More >>

One of DeLand's coffee shops

​I had a terrible weekend in the south-central Florida town of Arcadia one time. I'd been drawn principally by the name -- but the place turned out to be far from paradisal: restaurants closed at 8 and were mostly dry. The villagers were like something out of a creepy M. Night Shyamalan movie: Humorless Pentecostals by day, you expected them to don goat masks and gather for blood-drenched orgies on the stroke of midnight.

I kind of expected as much from DeLand. But I was terribly wrong. In fact, DeLand turned out to be something of a gourmet's arcadia -- the real thing. Not only does this charming little city, just three hours north by car in Volusia County, have an excellent, global cuisine restaurant called Cress but it's also home to two wide-ranging wine shops -- Designing Wine, which makes homemade wine, and the

"What happens at the Grape stays at the Grape."

​Elusive Grape (DeLand also hosts an annual winetasting event in August). And of course, the reason we'd gone in the first place was to visit Deep Creek Ranch, which supplies free-range, grass-fed beef and lamb to the most respected restaurants in Florida, including our own 3030 Ocean, Cafe Boulud, and the Breakers (and Michael's Genuine in Miami).

The Saturday we showed up, the town was putting on a Pirates' pub crawl, principally for the purpose of doing beer tastings. The streets were awash in buxom damsels and their peg-legged swain, each wearing a tiny beer mug on a chain strung around their necks. The pirates were loping from bar to bar sampling brews. I was still spooked in case the town might shut down at nightfall, so I went straight to the Elusive Grape and picked up a bottle of Lost Canyon Russian River Pinot Noir, just to be safe.More >>

Lisa Rab

​Just up the road from the Mennonite Tourist Church, on a street where women in white bonnets and blue dresses pedal their bikes to the store, is a time capsule of a restaurant.

Inside, the abundantly cheerful waitresses wear flowered aprons with frilly white trim. Checkered cloths adorn simple, wooden tables. A diamond-shaped quilt hangs on the wall, along with a poster that reads, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." The smell of fresh bread is everywhere.


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ieatishootipost.sg

​If Palm Beach is known for anything its as an enclave for the rich and powerful, a place where the Rush Limbaughs of the world can duck into their mansions like shells on a crab's back. But halfway across the world, Palm Beach is known as the birthplace of one of Singapore's most unique dishes, chilli crab.

I've never eaten a chilli crab, but based on the reports from Singapore-based blog ieatishootipost.sg, it's a dish I'm dying to try. It's made from hard-back mud crabs that are stewed in a spicy tomato sauce that sometimes has sambal, egg, and crab roe as well. It looks exceptionally delicious, if a little difficult to eat. (It's also given me the idea to ask a Singaporan how to eat Bamboo Fire Cafe's curry crab and stay clean.)

The Singapore Palm Beach is actually a restaurant that started as a shack on the Kallang River in 1956 by Cher Yam Tian and her husband Lim Choon Ngee. The couple named the place "Palm Beach Seafood" for the for the coconut palms that lined the beach nearby.

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Last week, I took some much needed vacation time and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive down to Key West for a bit of R and R, Conch-style. And what a great trip. I hadn't been to the Keys in nearly 10 years, which is far too long an time for any self-respecting South Floridian with liver intact. But driving down that two-lane strip of US-1, past roadside shacks promising the "world's best Key lime pie" and hand-drawn signs promising whole lobsters for less than $5 a pound, it felt like the Keys hadn't changed at all in my absence. Aside from the construction entering Largo (and what a maddening experience it is to get stuck behind someone going 25 on that stretch), the drive is idyllic and untouched. You pass in and out of these small islands, and the scenery changes constantly, from the Shell Worlds and mega-hotels of Largo to the sleepy docks of Marathon and the long, isolating expanse of the Seven Mile Bridge. Through it all, that sense of Old Florida remains the sole constant -- the leathered, booze soaked vibe that seems to get hauled onto the docks alongside mountains of bountiful sea life. For someone used to heading north through the boring flatlands near the Turnpike, it was a welcome change.

Arriving in Key West, we were determined to hit up all the old stops we missed so: The Southernmost Point, a short step from our eponymous hotel down the road, which overlooked Duval's South Beach. The Hemingway House, where it's impossible not to be in awe of a man, a writer, who understood life as equal parts high adventure and simple pleasure. And the restaurants, a collection of eateries inspired by the wonders of fresh seafood, joie de vivre, and a healthy dose of oddball quirk.
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Flickr user: DOliphant

This is caviar compared to airport food.

It was 6 p.m. the night before a long weekend, and so far my getaway trip was going smoothly. I'd made it through the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport security screening line with half an hour to spare before boarding time. Now, I was starving. But where the hell could I eat?

I was stranded in Terminal 2, the unfortunate outpost for Northwest flights. My options were: burger, hot dog, or greasy sub, a prepackaged, refrigerated turkey sandwich, or a stomach-turning personal pizza, which looked and smelled exactly like the microwaved, congealed-cheese variety they used to serve in my junior high school cafeteria. Each choice was more nauseating than the last. I noticed a few other passengers making the same bewildered circle around the tiny terminal that I was, unable to accept that these were their only options.

In one corner, there was a tantalizing sign for cuban sandwiches and ropa vieja. But alas, the bakery that put out the sign was dark, closed except for a few muffins in a display case. Was this some kind of punishment for flying north during the off-season?
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Oyster beds in Cape Cod.

There's a certain kind of man who never fails to impress me, a guy who does things (apart from the obvious) that I could never do. Vacationing in Cape Cod last week, I met one of them: the contractor who was renovating the upstairs loft in my sister's new house in Chatham. After a full day of putting up sheetrock, this 60-something specimen showed up for dinner freshly showered in a nicely ironed pair of jeans and a black shirt, lugging a cooler full of oysters and clams that he had RAISED in his OWN BEDS, and proceeded to shuck them and serve half raw with a squeeze of lemon and the other half briefly broiled in the toaster oven with a crisp bacon topping.

*Sigh*?!?

Coincidentally, a tome called The Stag Cook Book fell into my hands recently, a charming, testosterone-fueled bible penned in 1922 "For Men by Men." [You can download the PDF here, and I highly recommend it]. Wives will have to swallow both their distaste for silly rhymes and their feminist ire at the opening ditty:

At range and at oven (whisper it) still,
Man is undoubtedly Master;
His cooking is done with an air and a skill,
He's sure as a woman -- and faster!

Well, messier, anyway, right, ladies? But it's hard to stay mad at the sweet lugs (the contributors include Houdini -- deviled eggs; Charlie Chaplin -- steak and kidney pie; Rube Goldberg -- hash; and Douglas Fairbanks -- bread tart) when they've gone to such trouble to write down their homespun recipes for chowders and welsh rabbit and baked beans and -- yes -- cornflakes.

In honor of the good men of Cape Cod, hit the jump for a very simple stag codfish recipe.
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Isn't that Paradise Hot Dogs?

Picking right back up from yesterday's post on my weeklong eating adventure in New Orleans, I'm going to talk a little bit about sammiches, a foodstuff that's well-respected and well-represented in the Crescent City. While some cities can claim to have contributed one sandwich to the national culinary landscape -- Philadelphia has the cheese steak; Chicago the Italian beef; New England, Boston, and New York have grinders, submarines, and heroes -- New Orleans has two: the po-boy, or poor boy, and the muffuletta.More >>