15 hours

7:30 am - Leave my house for the airport

9:00 am - Get on the plane to Chicago

9:30 am - Eat most of a $2 airplane snack of Pringles for breakfast

9:30 am (ahh, the power of timezones) - Land in Chicago

10:45 am - Walk past the new Garret Popcorn location on Randolph. Breath deeply, vow to stop on the way back.

11:00 am - Lunch at the Park Grill Chicago. This restaurant is actually in Millennium Park, so you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be a great spot for a foodie lunch. But it was very convenient to our meeting, and came with recommendations from at least one foodie, so I figured it was worth a shot. When we arrived at 11 it was dead quiet, but by the time we left the place was filled with people - downtown workers, families with kids. The food was pretty good. I had a lamb sandwich with goat cheese and roasted red peppers and salsa verde. One of my coworkers had the Kobe beef burger (with Gorgonzola, caramelized onions and grainy mustard) which, our waiter tells us, was ranked the #3 best burger in the city of Chicago. Both the sandwiches came with fries, and they were perfect. Hot, crisp, really nicely done. The other coworker we were lunching with had the crab and avocado salad and couldn't stop raving about it. So if you're in the neighborhood and it's not too busy, give it a try - it will probably be a better meal than you'd expect.

12:15 pm - Head off to get ready for our meeting.

4 pm - Finish the meeting.

4:30 pm - Stop at Garrett's popcorn and buy a small bag of caramel crisp to bring home. Yes, I know it would be more traditional to get the Chicago mix, but I wasn't in the mood for cheese corn with my caramel corn. The popcorn tastes even better than it smells, and the whole experience reminds me of my youthful days working for Kernels Popcorn.

6 pm - Get through security at O'Hare and ask the airport cop if there's a Gold Coast Dogs accessible from the terminal we're in. There is, and it's just a short walk away. I get a char dog, although I once again give shortshrift to the purist Chicago experience, and only top my dog with mustard, tomatoes, pickles and celery salt (leaving out the onions, relish, and sport peppers).

7:00 - On the plane

9:30 (time zone shift bites back) - Land in Detroit

10:30 - Home! I munch on a little more popcorn, drink some water, and go to bed.

Robert is Here

I first read about this farm stand in Issue 70 of The Art of Eating. When I found out I was going to be in Homestead, FL for work, I had this vague inkling of having heard of that area before. Eventually I discovered the Fruit and Spice Park, which had been featured in the same article as Robert is Here, and slowly but surely I started to remember why all of this seemed so familiar.

Once I put all the pieces together, it was an easy decision to scrap my plans to hit South Beach and check out art-deco hotels, and instead take myself on a culinary tour of this south Florida farming community.

Robert is Here is certainly a strange name for a farm stand. Here's the story, according to the Art of Eating article:

[Robert's] father was a farmer who used brokers to sell his produce. One day a broker said he'd been unable to find a buyer for a large supply of cucumbers. Robert's father asked for them back, so he'd at least be able to reuse the crates. But what to do with the cucumbers? He decided to put his six-year-old son to work.

He dropped the boy off at a nearby crossroads on a Saturday morning, along with a table, the cucumbers and some change in a coffee can. Robert sat all day. When he was picked up at dusk, he hadn't sold a single cucumber. No one had even stopped.

That can't be, thought the father. Perhaps people hadn't even noticed the small boy? He retrieved two hurricane shutters from the barn, spray-pained "Robert is Here" on each, and sent the boy back out on Saturday morning.

Okay, today this story would end up in child neglect charges, but this was 1961. Robert sold all the cucumbers, and a business was born. He started taking donations of extra produce from neighboring farmers, although when they found out how much money he was making, he had to start paying them. During the school year, he'd set up his stand with a can labeled "honor system" during the day, and get dropped off by the school bus to work the afternoon shift. By the time he was age 8, things were too busy during the day to leave the stand alone, so Robert hired his first employee.

Robert is Here continues to be a family affair. When Robert was helping me pick out fruit for my Taste of the Tropics party, he pointed out all of his kids to me, working at various tasks around the stand. It's a friendly, family kind of place, just like you'd expect. Robert himself was a great host, cutting a perfectly ripe passionfruit in half for us to share, and helping me select guavas and papayas that would be perfectly ripe in exactly 2 days time (and they were).

I didn't try one of his famous Key Lime milkshakes - something I sorely regretted when my dinner plans got pushed back a couple of hours. In addition to fruits and vegetables, both ordinary and exotic, the stand also features a huge variety of sauces, jams, jellies and honeys, most of which are available on their website. They also ship citrus, and perhaps other fruit as well.

Robert is Here
19200 SW 344th St (aka Palm Dr)
Homestead, FL
305-246-1592

Fruit and Spice Park

Carambola (aka Star Fruit)

This week, I had the opportunity to visit a really fascinating place - the Fruit and Spice Park in Homestead, FL. This 35 acre botanical garden has over 500 varieties of exotic fruits, herbs, spices and nuts from around the world. The park was mostly flattened by Hurricane Andrew, and they are still rebuilding. But there's plenty to see. Tours by tractor-driven tram are offered three times a day, and I highly recommended timing your visit to start with one. The biggest problem with the park is that the signage is nearly non-existent, so a tour is almost a necessity to know what you're looking at. And what you're tasting - visitors are invited to eat any fruit that's on the ground. Picking off of trees is forbidden to all except the tour guides, who will provide you with plenty of tasty snacks as they take you around the park.

The park is open year round, and because of Florida's climate and the diversity of plant species, there's always something new coming into season. Most of the fruits that are ripe that day are available for tasting at the gift shop/park entrance building. Fruit can't be taken out of the park, and none are available for sale. But fortunately, there's an excellent fruit stand just a few miles away called Robert is Here that carries many exotics. (Stay tuned for more about Robert is Here in a near future post.) Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the tour - check out my web album to see the rest and take a virtual tour with descriptions.

The stunningly beautiful flowers of the Guiana Chestnut.


Yellow coconut palm

Balsam Pear - considered a weed, but the prettiest I've ever seen!

Eating Rollinia (aka "snot fruit") fresh from the tree. Yum!

If you're a foodie in Florida, I highly recommend making a stop here. It's just 35 miles south of Miami, and right on the way to the Florida Keys.

Fruit & Spice Park
24801 S.W. 187th Avenue
Homestead, Florida 33031
305-247-5727

Eating El Paso

Last week my travels took me to the city of El Paso. I had a couple days of great meetings, and my contact there, José, was an excellent tour guide who was totally willing to indulge my foodblogging idiosyncrasies.

After a very long day of meetings on Wednesday, we wanted to go out to dinner. I showed him the list of restaurants that I'd assembled from my pre-trip research, and he picked out GeoGeskes. We actually ended up at Geskes Fire Grill, which is the sister restaurant to GeoGeskes and was much closer to where we were.

Despite the five TVs surrounding the bar, this would be a good restaurant to go to with a date, as there are a lot booths that really encourage sitting next to the person you're with. In fact, it was a little difficult in one of those booths to find a seating configuration that worked for a business meeting sort of dinner. But we managed.

My initial impression of the menu was fairly "eh." Burgers and other sandwiches, some not very exciting sounding entrees (although if I was a lobster fan I definitely would have been enticed by "The 'L' Pasta - Linguine, lobster, lemon, leeks.") I was also still recovering from the giant burrito I'd grabbed in the airport for lunch, so I think food just wasn't very appealing, and the idea of ordering an entree was overwhelming. So instead I ordered the sashimi appetizer and a house salad. José ordered a bacon cheeseburger with margarita fries.

As you can see in the pic, what they call sashimi isn't - it's a seared but still very rare piece of nice tuna. This happens to be just how I like my tuna, and the menu did state that it was seared, so I knew what I was getting myself into. It was drizzled with a sweet tamari glaze and sprinkled with sesame seeds and was all in all a delightful appetizer. The house salad was similarly well executed. Despite being an awfully busy salad - blue cheese, cashew bits, parmesan crackers, dried cranberries - it actually worked really well. It was perfectly dressed - a nice light coating of balsalmic vinaigrette on every leaf and not at all soggy.

José raved at length about his burger, but I didn't taste it so can't comment. I can, however, give huge raves to the margarita fries. This huge mound of shoestring fries with citrus salt would have fed at least two more people, and they were perfectly hot and crispy with a salty-sweet-sour tang. Excellent.

Service was not so good as the food, and at times it was actually overbearing. And my mojito was perhaps a little watery. Still, the food was much better than I expected from the menu, and I suspect those margarita french fries could be downright addictive.

Geske's Fire Grill
1506 Lee Treviño, Suite C
El Paso, TX
915-593-3473

When I told José that I wanted to go to H&H Car Wash for lunch the next day, he was a little croggled. "No, really," I told him, "it's supposed to have really great food!" Later, as we walked past the people handwashing and detailing cars and into this divey little lunch counter, he made sure to remind me that he was doing this for me.

This was the first place I'd come across when I was searching for places to eat in El Paso. It seemed to be pretty high up on the lists of all the food cognoscenti. Here's a sample review from Chowhound. I knew I'd want to try some good Mexican food while I was in El Paso, so I decided to go for it. Lunch in a car wash - that would be a first!

As you'd expect, it's not much to look at. 3 tables and a bunch of stools at the counter. A stove covered in pots of this and that, which get moved out of the way to make room for other things. Menu posted on the wall.

We opted to try the chile rellenos and huevos rancheros. Both were good, although the chile rellenos were my favorite. José said they were almost as good as his mom's - high praise, indeed. He especially praised the beans, and when I asked him why, he told me that Mexican food is meant to be simple, and should taste like itself. Beans, cooked simply, mashed, and topped with just a little bit of cheese are the perfect example.

A pitcher full of potent salsa verdé added an extra kick to anything that needed it, and by the time we finished lunch, my face was bright red. A basket of fresh flour and corn tortillas on the side was the perfect accompaniment, and provided me with a fabulous revelation. Trying to tame the burn in my mouth, I finished up my lunch with a plain corn tortilla. It was amazing. I've had corn tortillas before, but they've been nothing to write home about. This one - just a locally made commercial one, not even handmade - tasted like pure, fresh sweet corn. A lovely finish to a lovely lunch.

H & H Car Wash and Coffee Shop
701 East Yandell Drive
El Paso, TX 79902
915-533-1144

Eating California

I haven't been posting very much lately because I've been on the road a lot for work. And not necessarily in a way that gets me out to restaurants that inspire great foodie posts. For example, here's what the last couple of days have looked like:

Sunday afternoon on the plane, flying to LA - bottled water, 2 clementines

Sunday night - Dinner with friends at Cozymel's, a Mexican chain restaurant. I was starving, so I ate way too many chips and salsa and couldn't eat much of my dinner, which was a really tasty slow-roasted pork with some lovely housemade flour tortillas.

Way too early Monday morning - leftovers from Cozymel's, eaten with my fingers

Slightly later - orange juice in the hotel restaurant

Lunch - A chicken taco salad at Taco Bell. I wanted an In-N-Out burger (I've never had one, but know people who rave about them), but there weren't any on the restaurant row where we had to grab a quick bite to eat. I would have gone for Tommy's World Famous Burgers (also highly lauded as better than average fast food) instead, but I ceded control of the restaurant choice to the driver a minute too late, and she picked Taco Hell.

At the airport - A four-cheese pizza from Wolfgang Puck Express. I wanted the spinach salad with gorgonzola and caramelized pecans and other yumminess, but this is California, so they're still not serving spinach.

I know there's way better food than this is in LA, and some day I hope to eat some of it. I'd briefly entertained the idea of going to Lucques for Sunday Supper, but opted to see friends instead. Oh well - there's always next time.

Vacation, all I ever wanted...

Tomorrow morning I leave for a few day's vacation in Chicago. I'm planning to keep up daily blog posts while I'm there, but if I'm missing in action, you'll know I'm having too much fun! Since the main thing I'm planning to do in Chicago is eat, I'll have lots to talk about! Here's a sneak peak of some of my culinary plans for the week:

Dinners at Alinea, Schwa, and Hot Chocolate (at the kitchen table with 11 eGullet people for this last one)

Lunches are still TBD, but Hannah's Bretzel, Hot Doug's, Heaven on Seven, "Little" Three Happiness, and Nuevo Leon are the top contenders.

Most days I'll just grab a quick breakfast, but Saturday morning before catching my train back home I'll be at Sarah Stegner's restaurant, Prairie Grass Cafe. I last ate her food when she was cooking at the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in Chicago (one of my first high end meals ever), so this should be quite a change!

I've got a few non-food activities planned, like visits to the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Field Museum, but mostly I'm going for the eating!

I got a new digital camera on Wednesday, and I've barely had time to play with it. But I'm hoping I'll be able to bring you some great photos from my trip!