Tagged: Tanya Tandoc

To me, there is nothing as sensually delightful as Asian grocery stores.  They have their own character and are as organic and wild as Western groceries are sterile and packaged.  As soon as you walk in to one you know you are no longer in the sanitized world of Dillon’s.  Asian groceries can smell funky, spicy, and a little fermented.  If they sell fresh seafood or meat you can smell that, too, a bass note of blood and sea to remind you that death and eating are vitally connected.  Fruits of all sorts in varying stages of ripeness are jumbled all together, some softer and sweeter than othe

I am often asked what my favorite restaurant in town is.  It’s an impossible question to answer.  There are too many excellent places to eat here and what I think is wonderful in a restaurant might be a total turnoff to someone else.  I have a penchant for dives, messy food, sketchy neighborhoods, unpronounceable names, and I don’t care a bit about décor if the food makes me drool.  For me, it’s all about the food and the love I feel from the people who make it.  If the love’s not there, the food’s not good.

Does anything smell better than a bakery? I can’t think of any other place where one can walk in and be enveloped with an aroma that gives such a feeling of goodwill and welcome. Every bakery I have ever visited has a yeasty, sweet, warm fragrance that immediately puts me at ease, no matter where in the world I am. I have been to ancient French boulangeries and brand new upstart artisan bakeries and they all smell like heaven.