In Mexico City, forget the nachos. Eat the street tacos.

by Grant Martin on

Several dishes come to mind when most Americans think of Mexican food: tacos, burritos, quesadillas, nachos, what have you. It’s fairly simple, delicious food that many, including myself, have grown to love, and when I left the Midwest for Mexico City last weekend I was looking forward to trying some authentic Mexican food that wasn’t in a wrapper with a name on it and wasn’t eaten for “fourth meal”.

What I was told on the way south was that Mexico City was the capital of street taco stands. That yes, eating at them was a little risky, but the reward was delicious and cheap. I must have had a dozen street tacos around the Zocalo while I was tooling around the battered city streets, my favorite filling a combination of some sort of steak, grilled peppers and onions, all for a mere 40 cents per taco.

What I was not told is that Mexico City is not the capital of nachos. My only attempt at ordering the delicious snack resulted in a sad pile of corn chips with some sort of Velveeta cheese sloshed over the top. No meat, lettuce or salsa. I saw another couple at the next restaurant looking dejectedly at theirs as well.

As it turns out, nachos are more of a Tex-Mex entity and I imagine as you get closer to the border the nachos become more voluminous (fun story on how the nacho was created on Wikipedia). I had no idea.

So take my advice when you go to Mexico: avoid your common American beliefs on what a taco, nacho or any other Mexican food should be as soon as you touch the ground. The nachos are crummy and the tacos are amazing. Just be careful what stand you go to and pick the popular one that everyone is milling around — that’s probably going to be the cleanest one.

Ode to hamburgers, but mostly White Castle

by Jamie Rhein on

Since this is National Hamburger Month, they are on my mind, particularly since Ohio is home to three hamburger chains: Wendy’s, White Castle and Max and Erma’s. Max and Ermas started with the gourmet burger as a focus, but morphed into more over the years.

Here is a bit of hamburger history to help you dazzle your friends with hamburger know-how:

  • In 1921, White Castle became the United States’ first hamburger chain when Billy Ingram, a real estate businessman type, and Walter Anderson, the man who first flattened hamburger into a flat patty with a spatula and grilled it on a bed of shredded onions, formed a partnership.
  • The company moved its headquarters to Columbus, Ohio in 1934.
  • White Castle’s name and signature building were designed to evoke the image of purity, cleanliness, stability, permanence and strength.
  • In 1930, White Castle commissioned a study through the University of Michigan to prove that White Castles are good for you. A college student ate nothing but White Castles for 8 weeks. He was fit as a fiddle after wards.
  • The hamburger was considered low-class food before White Castle changed the public’s mind about it through targeted ad campaigns and PR initiatives. One initiative was printed coupons that offered 5 White Castles for 10 cents.
  • White Castle is credited to making the hamburger America’s first ethnic food. Up until White Castle, people tended to eat their own ethnic background food. As more people ate White Castles, beef production went up.
  • In 1961, White Castle was the first chain to sell a billion hamburgers.
  • Wendy’s is credited as being the first restaurant to have a drive-through, pick-up window. That restaurant is on Henderson Rd. in Columbus. The original Wendy’s that was located in downtown Columbus closed last year, partially because it didn’t have a pick-up window so that adversely affected its sales.
  • This year marks the 50th anniversary that a Max and Erma’s has been in the historic building in the German Village section of Columbus. Max and Erma Visocnik opened the original Max and Erma’s as a bar/tavern back in 1958. It was bought by Todd Barnum and Barry Zacks in 1972 with the intention of turning it into an eatery that sold gourmet hamburgers.
  • Of the three chains, the only one that is still family-owned is White Castle.

As you are eating a hamburger sometime this summer, thank Billy Ingram. If you are my cousin, Brad you can thank Billy and Walter for starting off the path to your wife. Without the Slyder® hamburger, there wouldn’t be White Castle, and without Billy, the chain wouldn’t have existed.

My cousin and his wife first met in a White Castle parking lot in Florence, Kentucky in 1977. They are still happily married. Now, that’s a real hamburger story.

Favorite towns: Woodstock, the place in upstate New York where the concert didn’t happen

by Jamie Rhein on

Even though the town of Woodstock in the Hudson Valley region of New York balked at letting the mega concert happen within its domain—and even though all of Ulster County didn’t want the concert there, Woodstock the town is a groovy, upscale (and a little downscale) arts haven that is definitely worth heading to for a day of wandering, particularly if you like to shop for lovely, interesting items. It is one of my favorite towns to head, particularly because the people who live here make sure it remains true to who they are and not what corporate giants would like them to be.

There are tree-lined streets and small historic buildings. The arts focus started here back in 1902 which helps make it eye candy for shopping. Plus, even though the concert didn’t happen here, hippies are welcome and mixed in with the upscale, there is an edgy grit.

I head here every summer to look for wedding, baby and birthday gifts, plus a new pair of shoes. The shoes are for me. Sometimes it’s a quick trip, mostly for the shoes, but once in awhile there’s that wonderful summer day where no where else really matters. Here is my Woodstock guide–mostly shopping. Everything I’ve listed, I have done.

Some shopping stops that are my favorites:

If you wander along Tinker Street where each of these are located, you’ll also come across shops selling all sorts of specialty items from kitchen supplies to books to clothing to greeting cards. Some shops are the up-scale variety and others center around tie dye and incense.

Clouds Gallery: Located on the right-hand side of Tinker Street if you are driving up through town. The specialty is hand blown contemporary glass, fine American crafts and jewelry. My daughter has a collection of blown glass hearts– one for each birthday, from this store. The hearts are gifts from my mother who is my companion on these jaunts. Tell Robert, the owner, I said hi.

Pegasus Footwear: This is where I always find an interesting pair of shoes. The types they sell are perfect for travelers’ feet. They also last.

Timbuktu: An eclectic mix of folk art, pottery, jewelry and fusion type fare from different countries. Whoever is the buyer knows his or her stuff. Presents I’ve bought here: salad servers with beaded work from Kenya, a hand painted clock with a sun’s face on it, and ceramics to name a few.

Tinker Street Toys of Woodstock: Right next door to Clouds. This is a child’s dream store (and adults). I’ve played in here many a time and pick up stocking stuffers for the real kids in my life–and my husband.

For other shopping suggestions, click here.

Where to eat

Our favorite place is The Little Bear, an upscale Chinese restaurant two miles out of town. Eat in the sun room type addition. It overlooks a stream and you may even see deer. I’ve been here with kids and the staff has always been amenable–even when my son was only a year and a half.

Anywhere I’ve wandered in for a bite, I’ve found the food good, but you can’t go wrong at The Little Bear.

What to do at night:

The Tinker Street Cinema movie theater, housed in a former church–, the old wooden, white kind, is a one-screen kind of place. Popcorn always tastes better in movie theaters like this one. The last movie I saw here was 21 Grams.

There are other things to do at night, but since I’m mostly visiting family and friends in Kingston, I’m not here much after dinner. Folks, who have, please offer suggestions. I do know there are always concerts, talks and art events going on somewhere. This is a happening place.

Other places to head:

Where Woodstock, the concert happened. It takes a 43 mile drive.

Bolshoi in Russia: Train to St. Petersburg and other excuses for obscene vodka-drinking

by Iva Skoch on

Greetings from Moscow! Bolshoi in Russia is my variation on Big in Japan. (Bolshoi means “Big” in Russian. Get it?) Stay tuned for my live dispatches from Russia.

There are two ways to travel between Moscow and St. Petersburg and they cost about the same. Either you fly–and you have to be prepared to fly Aeroflot or worse–or you take the train. They cost is about the same: $100 one-way. It was a no-brainer for me. I boarded the fast train to St. Petersburg this weekend hoping to catch a glimpse of rural Russia along the way. I don’t think we quite pulled out of the Leningradskaya train station when the first vodka came out.

Train experience

I had no complaints about this train. It is a pleasant, 5-and-a-half-hour ride through flat, yet picturesque countryside. You can still see signs from the communist times on abandoned buildings by the train station: “Power to the workers” and stuff like that. The farther away from Moscow you get, the nicer the landscape is. We were thankful we took the fast train. There is also a slower, overnight train, that takes about 8 hours, but I honestly can’t imagine doing vodka shots one minute longer than we did. The overnight train costs the same as the fast one. The advantage, I guess, is that it save you one night’s hotel. (Big savings in this expensive piece of the planet). There is also the new super-fast train that makes the trip in some 4 hours, but it’s still very new…hence totally overpriced.

The neither-super-fast-nor-totally-slow train we chose was new and comfortable. They even had waiters on the train and should you wish to order vodka right as you leave the station, you made do so. It costs about $30 for about 8 ounces of it (which is about 5 times as much as you would pay for it if you bought it in the store before boarding), but they do bring it to you in a flask, with crystal shot glasses. When was the last time New Jersey Transit did that for you, ah?

You get assigned seats and maybe you-like us-will be fortunate enough to sit next to a couple of drunk newlyweds. I am told this is not how the “typical” train ride from Moscow to St. Pete’s goes. Usually, this train ride is really sophisticated, packed with business commuters from the two cities. The three of us were lucky (or extremely unlucky, depending on your point of view) to get seated next to the newlyweds, who brought lots of homemade food and wine on board with them. Frankly, we were all about joining their wedding party. I even got to sing a Russian war song I first learned at school at the age of eight. I was proud I still knew the lyrics.

Train wedding and other excuses for daytime drinking

I have seen a lot of odd wedding parties in my life (including one in which the couple chose Kanye Wests’s “Gold Digger” as their wedding song). However, I can’t say that I had ever experienced a wedding celebration on a commuter train before. The newlyweds were a couple of kids-20, maybe 25 years old artistic types (see picture). They even brought their book of published poems, and played music they’d recorded. They were still in their wedding outfits because they literally just got married in Moscow and were traveling to spend their honeymoon in St. Petersburg.

Here is the thing about traveling in Russia. It is pretty hard to meet locals, unless you are willing to drink with them. Drinking is bonding. I mean, really, can you refuse to drink vodka (and eat sandwiches filled with God-knows-what) with newlyweds sitting next to you on a train of all places? You can’t. That’s exactly my point. It is virtually not possible to avoid drinking alcohol in Russia, even in the oddest circumstances, such as being on a commuter train from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

The excuses to drink any time of day in Moscow are endless. I could see that developing an alcohol problem would be really easy here. As I overheard yesterday: people drink vodka because “it makes life go by faster.” Often, that could be a good thing here: spend a cold, rainy day or two in Moscow, trust me. There is nothing enticing about it. Vodka: you can always count on it.

Finally, St. Petersburg!

We pulled into the Moskovskaya train station in St. Petersburg around 10 pm. Russian train stations are always named after the destination they service. The train station from which you go to Moscow is called Moskovskaya, the train station from which trains go to Kiev is Kievskaya, etc. Needless to say, there are a lot of little train stations everywhere and they all service only that one general route.

Here is the thing that was strange. It was 10 pm and we were a little tipsy. That’s not the strange part. The weird thing was that it was broad daylight outside. I forgot how far north St. Petersburg was. They actually get white nights here in June. Even at the end of May, it was getting dark between 11pm and midnight and it was daylight again at 4am. I noticed the extra hours of daylight gave me extra energy. You need all the extra energy you can get in St. Petersburg. You want to see as much of it as possible. It is a stunning city! More on that later.

From Russia, with love.

Ode to Sidney Pollack: Travel where his movies were made

by Jamie Rhein on

Sidney Pollack died of cancer yesterday. When I heard the news, along with feeling sad about his death, I flashed to a certain restaurant in Hurley, New York that’s one of my favorite “when I go back home for a visit ” eateries,although it’s changed hands since Pollack used it as one of the settings for Tootsie.

The Hurley Mountain Inn where Dustin Hoffman bellied up to the bar with Charles Durning has been serving up family fare for years. My mom always headed here with friends for the spaghetti and meatballs. The last time I was there, my son was happy playing video games without the money to actually have them do anything.

Hurley is near Kingston in the Hudson Valley and the restaurant is worth the drive. Nothing fancy, but you’ll feel like you’re in a place that means something to the people who eat there. Along with Hurley, if you do a Sidney Pollack film tour of the world, you’ll see a lot. Consider these alone and you’ll be busy:

  1. Sketches of Frank Gehry–Pollack followed Frank Gehry around with a camera and captured the architectural genius found in the Vitra Museum in Germany, Maggie’s Centre, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
  2. Out of Africa–The Africa scenes were filmed in the Ngong Hills in Kenya. The Denmark scenes were in Surrey, England.
  3. The Electric Horseman–For the gorgeous scenery seen in the film, head to Zion National Park and other places in Utah. For the rest, head to Las Vegas.
  4. The Way We Were–Bask in a bit of opulence at Ballston Spa, New York and in front of The Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.