As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, Wes and I have a tradition for our birthdays. The birthday boy gets taken out for a fabulous meal … somewhere. The destination is a closely-held secret, and the birthday boy never knows where he’s going to end up...

Last Wednesday I enjoyed a wonderfully low-key birthday celebration (joined by several bartenders — aah, my peeps! — including ones visiting from Portland and Seattle) at Copa d’Oro in Santa Monica, surely one of the best bars in the L.A. metro area. ...

A couple of New Orleans-related links … First, the New York Times writes about the upcoming New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival. Why, you might ask, would such a venerated bastion of New Orleans cuisine need special efforts to preserve it? Read...

When Wes and I were first looking for a house, we started in Highland Park. We liked the area, and figured we couldn’t afford Eagle Rock (and knew we couldn’t afford Silver Lake). We’d heard about a cool place there that stocked a lot of different...

You’ve seen the boy’s name mentioned here enough times, and even got to read a bit of his writing here and there (such as when I was, um, too blotto to clearly remember the end of certain meals).  He’s an excellent writer too, and I thought it was a...