When Regards to Edith opened a few months ago at the base of Google's Midwest headquarters in Fulton Market, it launched with a menu containing a few quirky nods to classic Chicago foods. You know, the sort of cheap and humble offerings you used to be able to grab for lunch in the exact same area before money flooded in from tech companies. That included a version of an Italian beef made with prime rib, and a double char burger topped with aged cheddar.
None intrigued me more than a dish I never thought I'd see at a restaurant with a cocktail menu and a $42 rack of lamb entree: a pizza puff. Just as you'd guess from the name, a pizza puff features a flaky browned exterior, with cheese, tomato sauce and usually a meat (pepperoni and sausage are most common) in the middle. It's always fried, always greasy.
At Monument Books, a bookstore in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the magazine racks are stacked with copies of The Economist and other titles from Britain, Australia, France and the United States.
But one top-selling magazine there was founded in Phnom Penh and takes its name — Mekong Review — from the mighty river that runs beside the city’s low-rise downtown.
“Radio Free Vermont” is more than “A Fable of Resistance,” as its subtitle says. It’s a love letter to the modest, treed-in landscape of Vermont, which Barclay wouldn’t trade for all the grandeur of Montana. It’s a dirge for the intense cold, which Barclay sorely misses — why is the world now brown in January, rather than white? (“It made him feel old,” McKibben writes, “as if he’d outlived the very climate of his life.”) It is an elegy for a slower, saner Vermont — “the world’s rush was doing it in” — and dependable Yankee virtues, like neighborliness and self-reliance and financial prudence.