Edible Complex

Chowder Heading

Chris Shake, Calamari Fest and Cooking for Solutions take a savvy and savory tact: smart seafood.

Audio clip Cooking for Solutions: Michel Nischan's Acceptance Speech if (AudioPlayer.check()) { AudioPlayer.init('audio_player_8', 'http://mcweekly.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/', 'inline'); } else { document.write('Download audio clip') } Download audio clip Chris Shake can’t imagine life without calamari and clam chowder. ...

Spicy Thoughts

Lokal plates buzz-worthy grub worth waiting around for, plus so much more.

You never see it on menus, but you feel it when you look at the right ones. You can’t buy it at the flyest farmers markets, but it’s an ingredient in all the best dishes. ...

Lookin’, Cookin’

A Chef of the Year tale made for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions.

When 2012 Cooking for Solutions Chef of the Year Michel Nischan got his first ever chef job (in 1981), he went looking for local farms like his late grandfather’s in the surrounding area. Only outside ...

Mother of an Event

Holman Ranch evolves its game beyond weddings – with heart.

Max Elliot, 5, is good at hide-and-go-seek, except for one small strategic weakness. He likes to squeak with excitement while he’s “hiding.” That doesn’t fit into the list of All-Time Top Hide-and-Go-Seek Techniques, but it ...

Appetizing Irony

Pebble Beach 5.0 delights in two different directions, while tasty Quick Bites breed and multiply.

On one hand there’s the tiny foie gras and granny apple salad appetizer, perched on the end of a tongue depressor, with a mini perfume spritzer filled with key lime juice holstered on the other ...

Super ’Nova

Recent updates to Carmel institution Casanova are downright delicious.

The first clue I was wrong: the butternut squash pizza. The pizza also enjoyed sage, Speck ham, arugula and Gruyère, but it was the fresh pureéd sauce made from squash plucked from the organic school ...

Five For Five

Defining moments from Pebble Beach Food & Wine’s first half decade, and how Miami crab fits in.

It’s short of 6 on Saturday at Joe’s Stone Crab in South Beach Miami, Fla., and in the 1,000-square-foot waiting room – and the bigger bar beyond – the energy and tight elbow room better ...

Spicy Living

Flavor bulletins from Puerto Rican places, plus Lokal love.

Forgive the coroner his surprise when he opens my chest cavity – where he expected to find an aortic organ, he discovers a small open-air roadside shack filled with Puerto Ricans instead. But that’s my ...

$20 Showdown

A battle over high-value Vietnamese and Rush Limbaugh’s food legend lives.

Poor Joel “Easy” Ede didn’t know what he was in for. The Weekly video-web guru had just agreed to a $20 Throwdown Showdown Challenge at Chopstix Vietnamese Restaurant in Monterey (372-2622). The idea: each contestant ...

Power Playing

Leon Panetta on restaurants, Pebble Beach Food & Wine on the horizon.

You heard it here first: If it weren’t for a certain family restaurant in Monterey, Osama bin Laden might still be alive. At least that’s my takeaway from a speech last week by Monterey High ...

Abject Terroir

Aubergine elevates the art of service, Pacific’s Edge delivers deliciously and a man cooks cats.

A while back I got a voicemail. Like the two that came right after it, it was anonymous. Like those two, it was over-stuffed with sharp opinions. And like the other two, it maxed out ...

Devil Sushi Dare

Testing one’s mettle versus Harumi nigiri – plus a new Big Sur spot.

It doesn’t appear on the menu with the yummy orgy of tempura that is the Captain Crunch Roll ($13.50) or the stylish Big Sur ($11.50) with its unagi, crab salad, avocado and ebi wrapped in ...

C Believing

The C Restaurant seduces by way of fly seafood and wine barrels, 1833 earns a James Beard biggie.

The tastiest music masters a balance between predictable and tumultuous. It comforts listeners with familiar chords, but buries the possibility of boring with surprising surges and shifts – keeping brains eager for the next note ...

Mushroom Remix

The Big Sur Chanterelle Cook-off ain’t dead yet – just different. Plus some lady on Craigslist wants funky meat.

The foragers are canvassing the woods as I type. Ventana Chef Truman Jones has surreal tastes plotted for his plates already. “Pickled, sauteed, in soup, crusted on fish,” he says. Hippie-chic chanterelle fashion is even ...

Well Above Par

Heartfelt benefits, EcoFarm insight and hall-of-famers.

At press time, Chef Thomas Snyder didn’t know what he was going to make for the third annual Clambake for a Cure Friday. Here’s two things we do know. One, judging from the seafood stew ...