Thanks, but no thanks I am the albatross around the neck, the black cat crossing the path, the red sky in the morning, the howling dog at night. Once I review a restaurant, it is game over, a permanent vacation via the bullet train to Insolvencyville. First, I find a gem of an artisanal pizzeria…
More than buddhas, ladyboys and Thai stick “Braindoc, where have you been?” inquired one of my esteemed medical colleagues. “You haven’t published any reviews recently which leaves me idle while I hold my morning audience on the porcelain throne.” One of the members of Goldstein Party of Five, the greatest rock cover band in the…
Se habla español??? As a callow youth, I never showed much facility for foreign languages. In order to honor California’s past and to foreshadow its future, Spanish was a required subject in the sixth grade at La Tijera Elementary School, strategically placed at the swampy, scissors-like intersection of La Cienega and La Tijera Blvds. Our…
Friendship I know that the public depends upon Braindoc, the maestro of mastication, for objective, impartial and dispassionate judgment (and occasional witty reportage) to guide your culinary selections among the multitudinous options throughout the Los Angeles Basin and the four corners of the earth. To sift, to winnow, to separate the wheat from the chaff…
You are what you drive I want to take you for a trip in the Wayback machine. When I was in medical school, I invited two classmates from large, rectangular states in fly-over country to join me at home in L.A. for the beginning of summer vacation. They traded their Polo shirts and Brooks Brothers…
The Waste Land I had intended to start this review of BLVD Steak, a new swanky restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, in my typical pseudointellectual fashion with a reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month”…blah, blah, blah. To be honest, I never really understood poetry. At every lecture that…
Veni Vidi Mangia My worldly and sophisticated wife was born in Sansepolcro in the Valtiberina region of Tuscany, near the birthplace of Michelangelo. It is a rural area of picturesque forested rolling hills, quaint family farms and tiny walled medieval towns. Other than her parents, the remainder of her family stayed in Sansepolcro to live…
Are we really going to eat little Furball??? What flashes into one’s brain with the thought of Peru? Machu Picchu, the source of the Amazon, the Andes? Those with a more juvenile mindset might think of Lake Titicaca or toilets flushing counterclockwise due to the Coriolis Effect. I harken back to my teenage years, before I…
Omerta “Mista Silverstein, how they hangin’?” boomed raucously across the main dining room in the unmistakable voice of Johnny “Roastbeef” Williams. Roastbeef is the greeter, raconteur and wisecracker at Rao’s in the heart of Hollywood, the west coast branch of the famous and exclusive East Harlem Italian haunt. My Tuscan born wife and I were…
Third time’s a charm My close friend Morrie Grossman, brother of producer Les Grossman of Tropic Thunder fame and himself a celebrated food critic (and who introduced me to Dear John’s), has another brother, Bernie Grossman. Bernie is a power attorney, a mover, a shaker, a rainmaker. He is the supreme managing partner of the…