Cooking for Solutions 2013 – Gut Instincts
The evolution of offal-pioneering chef Chris Cosentino continues to surprise – and so does his stance on true sustainability.
What would Wolverine eat? No really, what would the Marvel Comics superhero eat? It’s a subject that had buried into the brain of Chris Cosentino, the San Francisco powerhouse chef best known for bringing guts ...
Delivery services: the big new target in pot skirmishes?
On Feb. 13, the Monterey County District Attorney’s office quietly dropped its case against Joshua Mount, a driver for the medical marijuana delivery service 831 Delivers. Mount, along with 831 Delivers owners Ash Hewitt and ...
Fort Ord’s mother of all signature-gathering battles.
How many of you were approached over the weekend of May 4 by someone bearing a clipboard and asking for your signature to support Fort Ord? How many of you signed? More importantly, did you ...
ANTON & MICHEL
Storied Carmel institution Anton & Michel daringly switches gears, with mixed results.
The bar is beautiful. Carmel stone, cut thin, runs floor to ceiling. Large format bottles of local wines occupy small shelves. The polished wood bar gleams. Specialty cocktails like the Mad Martini ($9.50) and Planter’s ...
Monterey examines the serious issue of homelessness.
Somewhere in the middle. There has to be somewhere in the middle. The city of Monterey is on the verge of making serious decisions on how to handle what local businesses and some residents describe ...
WINE & FOOD 2013: Tube Meat Takeover
Butch Francis expands his Cowboy Sausage empire in inspired and crazy ways – including a pitch for national TV.
The Sausage King is in his element. There are women to flirt with and politicians to shmooze. There are old customers who didn’t realize he was again selling at the Oldtown Salinas Farmers Market after ...
Arms Race
New state law would fund the hunt for guns legally purchased by those who aren’t supposed to own them.
Monterey County Sheriff Scott Miller knows they’re out there. He also knows his department is too hamstrung to do much of anything about it without help. “They” are the weapons that were at one time ...
The races are linked. So too are we all.
It’s something of a dare: “You try to find some meaningful words or thoughts about this tragedy,” one of my pals posted Tuesday morning on Facebook. And I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing smart to ...
NPS security is confused about the First Amendment.
We were striving for a metaphor. What we got instead was an object lesson in the First Amendment and the power of bullies with badges. On April 2, I sent Weekly photographer Nic Coury to ...
Seaside homeowners are looking for elusive peace.
Rudy and Terry Canchola readily admit it: When it came to doing renovations at their Seaside home, they didn’t exactly do everything by the book. They didn’t seek out and obtain all the proper permits ...
Marketers say they need to retell Salinas’ story.
At most any time of the day, save for an afternoon shift change when the number doubles for a brief time, there are only 11 police officers patrolling the streets of Salinas. It’s the largest ...
The U.S. Department of Justice looks at Salinas council.
Carol Russo isn’t allowed to talk about what she’s doing in Salinas. The work she does as a senior conciliation specialist – her actual title – for the U.S. Department of Justice is meant to ...
Moore Better Building
What the Weekly’s esteemed architect might have thought of LEED.
That postmodern architect Charles Moore was drawn to the water should come as no surprise. A quick bit of Google stalking reveals his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University focused on how the presence of water ...
Women gather in Monterey to champion each other.
The victims came to Ashley Nemiro in a flood of pain, some of their wounds visible, and many others not. Nemiro, a Denver-based doctoral student, was running a women’s empowerment program called “We Made This,” ...
Monterey City Council’s lesson in the political pull of money.
Much like the cultural anthropologist who spoke at the beginning of the nearly four-hour Monterey City Council meeting March 5 – and said she had studied the ways of consumer spending – I have studied ...
Salinas City Council distracts itself over Jose Castañeda.
It was a Salinas City Council meeting so contentious that at one point, police had to keep two attendees (he a grumpy old German man, she a ticked-off 40-something Latina) from throwing down over who ...
Downs backers need educating on the real Monterey County.
Of the many great moments in this week’s cover story by Assistant Editor Kera Abraham on the Monterey Downs proposal, I’m having a tough time determining my favorite. The Downs-produced video she describes in the ...
True Believers
The vision of Marina as a medical-marijuana Nirvana has one big problem: a government unwilling to take the plunge.
Marina residents Nobia Monsauret and Kevin Saunders have a dream that looks something like this: The ramshackle barracks of the old Fort Ord – the ones that nobody has been able to knock down or ...
A carb-fueled meeting on mortgages.
So riddle me this. If a city holds a community meeting but forgets the part about inviting the community, should they actually call it a community meeting? Should they call it something else, like, “that ...
That would be one way to read Republican actions.
Lost in the morass of partisan bickering over the fiscal cliff – Will they or won’t they? They will! With three minutes left to the deadline! – an important little fact for women, or anyone ...
HEALTH & FITNESS 2013 - Taking Recovery to National Dance Fame
How J.R. Martinez beat crippling injury, slimmed down and won Dancing With the Stars.
A funny thing happened to J.R. Martinez on the way home from the burn unit. “I got heavy,” Martinez says. “When you’re a burn patient, your metabolism gets thrown out of whack. You’re in recovery ...
Racial tensions inspire new Alisal newspaper.
How many pissed-off Chicano activists does it take to start a newspaper? No seriously, how many pissed-off Chicano activists does it take, especially when the end goal is smacking Salinas’ Gannett-owned daily straight where it ...
A newspaper hires armed guards over a lame story.
Here’s a question: Just because you can do something, should you? It’s been on my mind for days, and at the base of it is the mass killing of 6 – and 7-year-old children in ...
No world-ending event means one final column for 2012.
Iwas half-hoping the Mayans were right, because if they had been, it would have meant I didn’t have to write a column this week. It also would mean the Weekly could cease a holiday schedule ...
If we don’t heed the warnings, we’ll doom ourselves.
Of all of the terribly sad, chilling news since Friday, when a deranged man barely out of his teens took weapons owned by his mother and – after shooting her four times in the face ...
Salinas council slows plan for underwater homeowners.
I’m told that buried in the footnotes of a recent report from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is this little factoid: Sixty percent of all mortgages backed by private-label securities are going to default. There ...
Analyzing the nastiest detail of a brutal Salinas beating.
He was walking away. That’s the thing people don’t yet realize because nobody has yet put it out there. So here it is, in all its grim and ugly reality: Police say the homeless man ...
The People V. Eva Ruiz-Gomez
A Family-court battle turns ugly as a mom faces felony charges of interfering with the rights of her son’s father. the teen at the heart of it wonders why the courts won’t listen to him.
Eva Ruiz-Gomez steps through the double doors of Courtroom 13 at the Monterey County Superior Courthouse, her long, dark hair pulled back from her face, and asks for a phone. “I need a phone. I ...
One turkey gets cooked; Marina Coast turkeys go out kicking.
Two columns for the price of one, both on the subject of turkeys – the bird, and the human variety. One: It’s the week, of course, when we speak of gratitude. I had planned on ...
Party with Pluck
A community turkey slaughter brings us nose-to-snood with Thanksgiving dinner.
On the last morning of their last day on Earth, the turkeys Jamie Collins raised from poults to fat adults gather under the low-hanging branches of a towering Mexicali avocado tree. They coo and warble, ...
Sexy time with the nation’s military elite.
A friend of mine has, for the past few weeks, spent almost every waking moment at a Natividad Medical Center rehab facility, where her mother is recuperating from a stroke. She hasn’t had much time ...
Taxing Times
Salinas, Carmel pass sales tax measures, while Pagrovians just say no to Measure F.
The Texas developer who proposed a seven-story hotel on Pacific Grove’s Holman Block will have to rethink his plans. Measure F, which would have raised the building height cap to accommodate the proposal, took a ...
Battling youth-voter apathy and elder-voter ego.
I was fetching my eldest from Monterey Peninsula College the other day – don’t ask why an 18-year-old doesn’t have a license, as that’s another column altogether – and he told me his friend/study partner/classmate ...
Nailed It
Central Coast progressives stay in office, but a few key ballot measures go down.
Asleep and a wake up later, and here’s what stayed the same. Despite an electoral map that cut a swath of bright red through the middle and southern parts of the country, President Barack Obama ...
Six days left in the longest and craziest election season ever.
I started writing this column at 3pm on Tuesday as the Weekly is in full production mode, with the end goal of getting the paper to the printer by 10:30am Wednesday. And as I started ...
Osio Cinemas faces down its own extinction.
At the Osio Cinemas in downtown Monterey, co-owner Mark Borde had a decision to make this summer, one of the “change or die” variety. The change (as it so often is) was inevitable and going ...
Marinus
Star Turn: Bernardus Lodge builds upon an esteemed reputation with a refreshed look and seasonal food that merits more from Michelin.
Marinus at Bernardus Lodge is Carmel Valley’s throwdown answer to the French Laundry, a hotel restaurant that should be known as so much more, a place surrounded by grapevines and lush grounds meant for strolling, ...
Romney to women: Get your asses in the kitchen.
I had an almost violent verbal argument (OK, as violent as two reasonable adults can get on Facebook) with a dear old friend (my former dot-com-era writing partner) a few weeks back over the subject ...
Anti-Prop. 37 has deep pockets, but consumers are savvy.
I have a friend who’s gone a little bit nuts on the urban homesteading front this season. She posts pictures of her backyard chickens and their admittedly snazzy coop on Facebook. She fiends for the ...
Surprise: Some Silicon Valley rich guys oppose Prop. 30.
Here is what will happen on Nov. 7, the day after the election, if voters haven’t passed Prop. 30, the constitutional amendment backed by Gov. Jerry Brown and better known as the Schools and Local ...
How wannabe leaders are missing the point.
Two columns for the price of one, both on the subject of “no” and the possibility of “yes.” One: A lot has happened in the month or so since the Weekly reported on a radical ...
We can’t get an answer on SB 568.
Dart Container Corp. is a massive, multinational, multibillion-dollar corporation based in Michigan and run by a pair of brothers who in the early ’90s disavowed their U.S. citizenship and beat feet for the tax-friendly Cayman ...
KSBW’s reasons for censoring Western Stage make no sense.
In the 13 or so years that The Marketing Department (TMD) has been in operation, the Salinas-based agency has produced hundreds of commercials and purchased – in the estimation of founder and president Nick Pasculli ...
A Blueprint for Recovery
>The feds won’t do it, and neither will the banking industry. So why is a plan that could help local homeowners and reset the economy ticking off so many people?
It’s an idea so crazy it just might work. It was born with a bunch of rich liberals with consciences who were demoralized at the state of the nation and of what they generally describe ...
The Human Factor
A couple who the Mortgage Resolution Partners plan could have helped fought for their property all the way to jail.
On March 13, 2011, the same day that a massive tsunami struck the coast of Japan, Robert and Carrie Butler – he’s a cement contractor, she’s a massage therapist/stay-at-home mom – were being handcuffed and ...
Todd Akin has secured the rapist vote, but who else’s?
It would be easier to believe the story happened this way: The national media, as it is sometimes wont to do, confused a piece from humor site The Onion with actual news, then reported it ...
Alarming Salinas dog deaths distract from the real danger.
Here’s how Sunday nights work at my house: We eat dinner around 7:30pm. Our idiot dogs – a dyspeptic Jack Russell named Oliver and an exuberant Corgi mix named Lola – stand in the window ...
Former warden says California can’t afford death penalty.
From the time a death penalty case enters the court system in California, the count begins. There’s an estimated $40 million a year spent on death penalty cases at the county court level. Then $72 ...
Salinas rallying cry: Don’t let the sun go down on V.
Set aside, just for a minute, the public relations disaster the city of Salinas has created by the way it has handled the messaging around Measure V, the half-cent sales tax measure Salinas voters passed ...
Colorado shooting should inspire stronger gun control.
A topic of discussion around the newsroom is this: What are the sure-fire ways to tick people off in print? The answer inevitably comes down to two subjects: criticize a powerful religion, or criticize the ...
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