Roadtripping

My foodie day in Naples

You might not be lured by the promise of an olive oil tasting. I was.

I was planning a road trip to Naples to try out the Scion iQ, Toyota's answer to the Smart Car, when I heard about a new food tour in that city. What better way for a foodie like me to spend half a day in Naples, city of snowbirds and money? So I bought a ticket for the end of my stay.

Right now,  Naples is in its low season. Seasonal homeowners shutter their places and leave til the holidays. Restaurant owners take long vacations. Even the art museum is closed for the summer. So Naples Food Tours is doing only one food tour a week, on Saturdays, until the snowbirds start returning. In the spring, the company was doing three tours a week, varying the shops and restaurants so that someone who took a tour in March could do another in April and have little or no overlap in the stops. But in the slow season, there are fewer choices.

We had five stops, starting with the Naples Olive Oil Co., where we sipped thimble-sized samples of several olive oils and several balsamic vinegars. We were all stunned by how good the combination of strawberry balsamic vinegar and basil-infused olive oil tasted -- there we were, happy to be drinking salad dressing out of tiny paper cups.

We went to a pizza place for a slice, and some of the guys snuck off to the bar for a beer. We ate calamari at a seafood restaurant, Greek cheese and Hungarian and Bulgarian sausage at a cheese shop, and had a glass of wine at both places. We ended at Norman Love Confections, sampling beautiful and expensive chocolates.

Then I went to Trader Joe's. Why this purveyor of discounted wine and gourmet goodies would open its first Florida store in a city with perhaps the state's highest concentration of wealthy residents, I can't figure out. Seems like the wrong demographic. I know people from this side of the state who drive the 100 miles or so to Naples just to go to Trader Joe's and buy Three-Buck Chuck (the store's private label wine, at $3 a bottle). On this day I joined them.

So I drove back home with a stash of goodies I had bought on my foodie day in Naples: wine, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, cheese, chocolates, spiced nuts. I'll be tasting those memories for some time to come.

 

The world's best hotel restaurants?

I remember when hotel restaurants were places to be avoided. As a category, they had no history of serving exceptional food. As TheDailyMeal points out, that began to change about 20 years ago. The first place I noticed the trend was in Las Vegas, where celebrity chefs were opening branches of their flagship restaurants, most of them in hotels. I had amazing food at Prime and Picasso in the Bellagio, Aureole at Mandalay Bay, Joel Robuchon at MGM. Now, you can find some of a city’s best restaurants in hotels. TheDailyMeal’s writers have made a list of their 101 favorite hotel restaurants. Check it out here. 

It's Craft Beer Month in Virginia

You may not have known — I didn’t — that Virginia is developing quite a craft beer community. The state has about 40 craft breweries, not enough to call it an industry yet, but enough to organize a festival this weekend to celebrate the local brews. If you’re not already on the road to Virginia, you’re not going to make it in time for the celebration. But the state tourism agency has a list of breweries and an interactive map on its website, so you can design your own road trip tour of the breweries at your leisure. (Without knowing anything else about the breweries, I’m kind of partial to the animal names — Mad Fox, Lost Rhino and Wild Wolf.)  Click here to read about Virgiania’s burgeoning craft breweries. And by the way, if you’re more interested in wine, here’s a website for Virginia’s wineries. That industry is a little further along -- Virginia claims more than 200 wineries.

Road trip attraction: mushroom foraging

Foodie alert! The Four Seasons Resort in Vail, Colorado, has found a new way to entertain and educate its guests and town residents: mushroom foraging. The luxury resort offers a luxury outing, called Mushrooms & Mercedes. For $200 a person, a guide leads guests into the woods, teaches them what to look for and sorts through the mushrooms they pick. The price includes transportation in Mercedes SUVs, lunch, and a mushroom-themed dinner. Two outings remain this summer, but nearly every slot has sold out this first season. The resort plans to offer Mushrooms & Mercedes again next year. Read the full story here.

Photo credit: Don Riddle/Four Seasons Resort Vail

Sandwiches for the road

A sandwich can be a thing of beauty, perfection between two slices of bread. I’d put the BLT with avocado in this category, pulled pork (with the cole slaw on the sandwich) and certain shrimp or oyster po’boys. But other sandwiches are the stuff of culinary nightmares, creations that make you say “Oh, yuck!” — at least until you taste it. Lonely Planet has compiled a field guide to great regional sandwiches in the U.S., and there are a couple that fall into the latter category — I haven’t tasted them, and my first reaction is ewwww! For example: the chow mein sandwich, fried chow mein noodles in a brown sauce with stir-fried pork or chicken and vegetables in a hamburger bun, native to parts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Check out Lonely Planet’s article here, then come back and tell me which one you want to try on your next road trip — and which one you hope never to encounter.

A taste of noir: Sipping a Black Dahlia

If you're a fan of Los Angeles-style noir books and films, if you've ever pondered the disappearance of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, if L.A. Confidential is one of your favorite movies, then be sure to read this story by Sam McManis, who will take you on a tour of noir spots in the City of Angels.

The Millennium Biltmore, where Elizabeth Short was last seen alive, has built on that little slice of noir notoriety by inventing The Black Dahlia cocktail, with citrus vodka, Chambord (a raspberry liqueur) and Kahlua. This evening, I mixed a Black Dahlia and took it out in the backyard to enjoy as the sun went down. The verdict? The sweetness of the Chambord dominates. 

Want to try it? Here's the recipe:

Black Dahlia

3 1/2 oz. citrus vodka
3/4 oz. Chambord raspberry liqueur
3/4 oz. Kahlua coffee liqueur
Ice
Tools: shaker, strainer
Glass: cocktail
Garnish: orange zest

Shake ingredients in a shaker. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish.

From the Gallery Bar at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles

 

 

Road trip dining: Best cities for BBQ

Yesterday I gave you TheDailyMeal.com’s list of the world’s most outrageous restaurants. Today, I bring you comfort food — relatively speaking — with Food & Wine’s list of the best cities for BBQ. The list has about 20 cities or regions, says what’s distinctive about each and offers a restaurant or two where you can taste each city’s classic BBQ. Food & Wine offers three regions in Texas, four in the Carolinas, cities with deep-rooted BBQ traditions like Memphis and Kansas City, and then a few oddballs: Oahu for its huli-huli chicken, Owensboro, Kentucky for its mutton barbecue, and Decatur, Alabama for its white barbecue sauce — mayonnaise and vinegar. Read this list and just see if you’re not checking your vacation calendar for a road trip to whichever sounds best.

 

World's most outrageous restaurants

TheDailyMeal.com returns with another of its lists of odd and outlandish meals. This time: World's most outrageous restaurants. The Disaster Cafe in Lloret de Mar, Spain, simulates recurring 7.8 earthquakes. Ka-Tron Flying Chicken in Thailand features flaming chickens (already cooked) catapulted across the room and caught by waiters on unicycles. In Tokyo's Lock-up, guests are locked into cells and handcuffed and forced to watch (fake) electrocution demonstrations. Eternity restaurant in Ukraine is a giant windowless coffin with funeral-themed decor. After all, what's the point of travel if you don't try out new new places? OK, I admit it, I'm not in any hurry to check out these places, but if you are, you can find the story here. 

The best dishes at chain restaurants

Josh Dinar, author of Good, Better, Best Dining Out: A No-Nonsense Guide to America’s Favorite Chain Restaurants, has come up with a list of 10 chain restaurant dishes he thinks you should try on your next road trip. He also tells us where we should eat them, although he doesn't say why, for example, the crab cakes at the Cheesecake Factory in Chicago are any better than the Cheescake Factory's crabcakes in Baltimore. Or why the Caesar Salad at Tony Roma's in Anaheim, Calif., is better than at the other nearly 200 Tony Roma's around the world. Here's the story and here's the slideshow list. 

What is the best sandwich in the USA?

Knowingly or not, the Travel Channel’s Adam Richman has entered the Miami vs. Tampa fray over which city is the real home of the Cuban sandwich. On Adam Richman’s Best Sandwich in America, which premieres Wednesday night, Richman looks at the first of 30 sandwich finalists. And here’s the thing: The only Florida city on the list is Tampa – twice! We’re not going to argue about the Grouper Reuben at Skipper’s Smokehouse. There are terrific variations on grilled grouper sandwiches all over the state. But Miami likes to think of itself as having the best Cuban sandwiches, an honor that Tampa claims for itself. The sandwich that Richman is featuring on his show is Aguila Sandwich Shop’s Media Noche sandwich, a variation on the Cuban sandwich but with a sweeter variety of bread, and stacked with cooked ham, roasted pork, Swiss cheese, mayo, mustard and pickles. The show premieres Wednesday with back-to-back episodes – Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York at 9 p.m., Tampa and New Orleans at 9:30 p.m. Keep reading to see the list of all 30 sandwiches. Read about the Miami vs. Tampa sandwich fight here.