Oxbow Market is a gourmet market/food hall just across the river from downtown Napa. For a foodie, it makes for pretty exciting shopping: charcuterie from the Fatted Calf, artisanal chocolates and olive oils, and the dairy delights of the Oxbow Cheese Merchant.

For those whose interest in food is mostly limited to eating it, the eateries […]

I went to bed last night not quite believing that not only had America elected a black man president, it had managed to wrap up the process in a single evening. Today, I was ready to celebrate. And where better than a Chicago pizza joint? I’m not sure what’s up with the bizarre punctuation of […]

This was my meal after voting early at the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. After driving 20 minutes to wait an hour to be able to vote, I felt like I probably should have just waited for Nov. 4, but no matter. I was within lunching distance of Little Saigon.
My Chowhound colleague Thi had […]

Last weekend I attended the Bay Area chowhound picnic, a foodie potluck set in Tilden Regional Park, in the hills above Berkeley. It was a shame that, having stayed up late preparing my dish and overslept the next morning, I had to rush past the park’s gorgeous scenery to reach the picnic site.
My contribution was […]

Driving between the southern suburbs of San Francisco, where we now live, and our former home of Los Angeles, you must get off the highway and go through the town of Gilroy. This town’s claim to fame can be smelled very clearly: garlic.
So every year, Gilroy holds a garlic festival, a celebration of the […]

“As long as you’re out here in the East Bay,” said Daveena, at whose place I was staying overnight, “you really have to go to Kopitiam for Hainan chicken rice.”
Hainan is in southern China (remember that plane incident?), but Hainanese chicken rice is part of the local culinary canon in neighboring Singapore, and also apparently […]

Last weekend I went to my first Giants game at AT&T Park, where the food may be as much of a draw as the game — its concessions were described in a recent NYT article as a leading example of upscale food in ballparks.
Wes, however, was dead set on a Sheboygan brat. He had […]

The Burmese sure love to mix things up. Seriously, at a Chowhound lunch at Mingalaba, almost every dish we ordered involved tableside mixing. It’s nice for once to have some idea of what ingredients are in an exotic and unfamiliar dish, but what’s with the national passion for blending?
Chowhound poster Moomin once wrote:
“Thoke” is […]