Last month while visiting Minnesota, Susan and I ate at Sushi Train, a local restaurant. I’ve since learned that there is also a restaurant in nearby Tulsa called Sushi Train, but the two places are unrelated. “Sushi train” is slang for any conveyer-delt driven sushi bar, so discovering that there are multiple restaurants with this same name is not completely surprising. It would be like finding two buffets 1,000 miles apart that were both named “Buffet.” It’s hard to know what’s authentic and what’s not authentic when it comes to Japanese and Chinese food. For example, 99% of all wasabi… (read more)

Watch this video on YouTube Nailed It is a Netflix baking competition where non-professional cake decorators with questionable skills do their best to reproduce fancy and artistic cakes in a short amount of time. The cakes are based on their taste and appearance, both of which are often bad, and the results are often disasterous. For Valentine’s Day, Susan came up with the idea of having our own “Nailed It” cake decorating competition. The day before Valentine’s Day Susan found a picture of this cake online, and recreating it to the best of our ability was the challenge. Just like… (read more)

Any review I write of last weekend’s Onion Burger Festival in El Reno wouldn’t be fair to the fine people who worked hard to put on a great event. There was nothing wrong with this year’s festival, nor was it significantly different from any other Onion Burger Festival I’ve ever attended. It wasn’t you this year, Onion Burger Festival. It was me. Dad and I arrived at the 34th annual onion burger festival shortly before lunch, with the smell of caramelized onions already wafting through the streets of El Reno. We parked where I always park, a secret spot just… (read more)

There’s something inherently American about Chinese buffets. I’ve never been to China so I could be wrong, but I’ve always suspected “bananas in red sauce” is a dessert more likely to be found in Tennessee than Tokyo. I’ve shopped at more than one local Asian market and never run across individual cup servings of ice cream. You know what they do sell? Bags of chicken feet and containers of blood. But not at the buffet. There’s nothing disgusting at the Chinese buffet — no chicken feet or “snake surprise” — only meat that tastes like candy and bananas covered in… (read more)

The thing I liked most about television’s Cheers was right there in the theme song: it was a place where “everybody knows your name.” Every time Norm or Cliff or any of the bar’s regulars walked through the front door and down those steps, they were greeted by name by Sam or Diane or Coach or Woody. I have never been greeted by name at any bar or restaurant. I don’t even know how that could happen. No waiter or waitress has ever asked my name, and I’ve never found a smooth way to inject it into conversation. (“By the… (read more)