Author: Nick Bergus

Iowa’s best new food writer?

I’m honored Jim Duncan named me best new food writer in his food-year-in-review column in the Des Moines alternative weekly City View.

This “new media” Iowa journalist wrote old fashioned rings around other young food reporters in traditional media — by practicing self examination without self indulgence and by teaching readers about his subjects.

A ridiculously nice thing to say. While he cites this blog, which embarrassingly hasn’t been updated since September (I promise to do better), I’d urge you to look at my A Pig in Three Parts package.

Yes, I buy wine based on the label

I try to look choosy when I’m at the store getting a couple bottles of wine; picking up a few to closely inspect the varietal and hints of the terroir. But really I’m trolling the low-end stuff. $6-per-bottle is my wheelhouse. And I say yea or nay based on pretty much on label design alone.

But when it was time to jump to a higher price point, how could I resist a 2005 Chateau Des Moines for $13 at Dirty John’s? It’s actually French, imported by a West Des Moines company. It was just all right. Better after it breathed for a couple hours.

At least it wasn’t Chateau Chunder.

Foodies’ Favorite Survives, Thrives

Originally published in The Tampa Tribune on Sept. 4, 2008

TAMPA – Good food has amazing curative powers. Thick tomato soup with drizzled olive oil at a Tuscan wine bar rescued me from car sickness induced by bouncing around wine country in a full backseat. Three-bean soup from the grocery store a block away from my college apartment cured my hangovers. A four-hour, eight-course meal from then-under-the-radar chef Grant Achatz cured me of the flu.

To that list add SideBern’s foie gras appetizer with caramelized peaches, pine-nut puree and sherry reduction. The dish rescued me from an impending cold.

Though it may have been the heirloom Berkshire pork belly, cooked sous-vide (a cooking process that involves vacuum sealing food in plastic and cooking it for long periods of time in warm water) and served with figs, walnuts and Taleggio cheese that has been blowtorched.

SideBern’s, described nine years ago in these pages as “a hip cousin to venerable Bern’s Steak House,” is still good at mixing the hip and the elegant. The interior, which hasn’t changed in a decade, features high ceilings, high-backed banquettes and classy blue sheer curtains.

But since executive chef Chad Johnson and chef de cuisine Courtney Orwig took over for popular Jeannie Pierola in December, the pair have slowly been putting their personal stamp on the menu. The dim sum and all but a vestige of Pierola’s “One World Cuisine” are gone. The outstanding cheese selection remains. Less elegant – but thoroughly respectable – meats, such as bison and pork belly, have appeared. The food has kept its edge.

But at times the hipster thing goes too far: When seated, each guest is presented with a 12-by-18-inch steel clipboard. Sorry, dear dining companion, if I accidentally smacked you with the unwieldy menu.

Picking an entree dish from that menu is still a pleasurable chore, and any of the constantly changing options would be a good bet. On a recent visit, we ate SideBern’s seared duck breast with pears and port glaze, filet mignon au poivre with wild mushrooms and creamy peppercorn sauce, and a great buffalo striploin with smoked hummus and pepperoncini sauce. Each lived up to our high expectations.

If picking one entrée is too much of a struggle, SideBern’s offers a five-course tasting menu for $75. Paired wines are a $35 option. But that may make the struggle to decide worse; for each of the five courses, diners choose between two options.

The desserts, a specialty of both SideBern’s and Bern’s, were a slight letdown. The chocolate beignets – five of them – were overcooked and accompanied by a dunk tank each of peanut butter, raspberry and orange sauces. The $8 Ultimate Milkshake, offered in any flavor of the house-made ice cream, wasn’t the best we’d ever had (it was too airy), but where else can you get a goat-cheese-and-almond shake? And the letdown says more about the quality of the entrees than the quality of the desserts.

Service was generally superb from the moment we walked in without a reservation until the time we left, but we had a few nit-picks: Our bread was served with butter that was still ice cold and unspreadable, and on three occasions, a dining companion was asked if he was still “working” on his entree before he had finished his meal. Between the unnecessary euphemism for “eating” and its repetition, we felt pestered.

Still, even with the changing of the guard in the kitchen, SideBern’s remains a beacon of hope on Tampa’s culinary landscape.

Quick reviews: Tampa

I ate out way too much while in Tampa for two months. Keep in mind that most of these reviews are based on a single visit and intentionally very brief.

  • Acropolis: A Greek restaurant nestled in Tampa’s Cuban neighborhood feels a little too touristy and while the food is good it’s a little overpriced.
  • Bar Louie: A superior, ever-shifting selection of beers on tap. Good, somewhat overrefined, bar food.
  • Bella’s Italian Cafe: Moderately expensive Italian place with good, classic food — mostly pastas and pizzas — and a good wine list.
  • Bungalow Bistro: A cute setting but a tries-too-hard restaurant. Shoots for fancy but just hits above average.
  • Cafe Dufrain: Laid back bistro with good food on the waterfront. On a nice day, sit outside.
  • Chihuahua Mexican Grill: Adequate Tex-Mex served in a dinning room dressed in kitsch. Chips are served in a dog bowl.
  • The Creperia Cafe: Decent crepes, both sweet and savory, served in a cafe setting. Options range from basic to caviar — with prices to match.
  • Daily Eats: A greasy spoon with better food and higher prices. Caters to the hipster crowd.
  • Fly Bar & Restaurant: Bar with good beer and liquor, restaurant with good small plates of food and lots of tattooed waiters and customers.
  • Five Guys Burgers and Fries: Good, greasy burgers and overflowing fries make this simple and delicious.
  • Frankies: No matter what the sign say, they serve the worst Philly cheesesteak ever. Good hot dogs, though.
  • Loading Dock Sandwich Pub: Lots of sandwiches, each custom built, and special sandwiches everyday.
  • Lucky Dill Deli: A few places packed into one, but it gets chaotic at lunch. Cheap Mexican food is served next to New York-style sandwiches.
  • Mise En Place: Upscale bistro with a reasonably priced lunch menu. Awesome grilled cheese (including blue and chevre) served with house-made fries and ketchup.
  • New World Brewery: Good, simple food (mostly pizza) and a great selection of beers on tap and in bottles.
  • NYPD Pizza Delicatessen: Premade crust means pizza that doesn’t live up to what New York-syle pizza should. Plus you have to go to Channelside. Yuck.
  • Paninoteca Mediterranean Café: Classy, good and still reasonably priced Mediterranean food, with lots of good sandwiches and lunch fare.
  • Samurai Blue: Served in a hipster setting, the sushi was honestly the best I’ve ever had. The specialty rolls offer a variety of flavors and textures.
  • SideBern’s: Hip-yet-elegant little brother of the venerable Bern’s Steak House. Great food, but it’ll cost you. (I wrote a full review for The Tribune.)
  • Square One Burgers: Perhaps a bit too expensive for what it is, but decent burgers. The fried pickles are delicious and the cupcakes are cute.
  • El Taconazo: Better know as the Taco Bus because it serves good, cheap, authentic Mexican food cooked in a bus parked behind the dinning room.
  • Tampa Bay Brewing Company: They brew good beer on site and use much of it in the food. The Brewer’s Choice burger with fried onions and blue cheese is good.
  • Taqueria Cantina & Burrito Joint: Fairly crappy, overpriced, inauthentic Mexican food, but a wide array of beers. Free chips for correctly answering a trivia question.
  • La Teresita: One of three classic Cuban joints in Tampa. The counter is for the younger set, while families eat in the dining room.
  • Three Coins Diner: A real greasy spoon with real greasy-spoon prices. You’ve eaten at here before, even if it’s your first visit.
  • Twisted Bamboo: Safe, competent-but-not-great Asian-influenced food that can’t figure out what it wants to be. (I wrote a full review for The Tribune.)
  • West Tampa Sandwich Shop: Cheap and great Cuban restaurant that serves a mean media noche sandwich and café con leche.

Chat with a 20-year-old Florida resident: an IM transcript

Her: I just remembered I have popcorn!

Me: Real or microwave?

Her: Wait… there’s something other than microwave popcorn?

Me: You must be joking.

Her: I mean, I guess I can figure out how you could have another option … but I wasn’t aware that that was still prevalent.

Her: Or something.

Her: Is it like, you put kernels in a pot?

Me: Yes. Like kernels in a pot. With hot oil.

Her: Huh. Imagine that.

Her:I’ve obviously been missing out.

Her:Wait, isn’t there a lot of corn in Iowa?

Me: Yes. Tons.

Her:Well, there you go. That’s why I don’t know.

Me: It has nothing to do with being an Iowan

Her: I was just looking for a loophole.

Update
As noted in the comments, This post should have called the ignorant popcorn eater a 21-year-old. I used 20-year-old because A) I was tired and B) as a poor stand-in for “twentysomething.” Death of a Pig regrets the error.

Tragedy both human and animal

This is, it seems, the age of the unrepentant meat eater. Of course it’s a lot easier to be unrepentant when you’re only seeing the clean, blood-drained, plastic-wrapped cuts of what was once a cow, a pig, a chicken. It’s easy, in feeding our hunger for cheap meat, to forget not only the animal tragedy but the human as well.

The New York Times (and many others before it) pointed out today, the illegal immigrants who worked for incredibly low wages at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, were ill treated after Homeland Security raided the plant in May. And anyone familiar with industrial meat processing can tell you that the workers weren’t treated much better when they were employees.

It’s not just the meat industry, of course. Industrial agriculture — Big Food — has an addiction to cheap labor and that often comes in the form of illegal immigrants from Latin America. But the industry does it on our behalf; if we didn’t expect 99-cent burgers, the story would be different.

Tampa ain’t no food town

Tampa, Fla., may be America’s 13th largest media market but it’s no food city. Three recent experiences:

  • Last night, I ate at Bungalow Bistro, so named because it’s inside a house (though I’m not sure the structure counts as a bungalow). Small joint with fewer than 20 tables that sells the quasi-upscale bistro food that is so common in Iowa City. I started with the soup — tomato-basil bisque — and found it thin and insipid and the flavor of canned tomatoes. Taste on Melrose is a cut above for about the same price.
  • El Taconazo — better known as the Taco Bus because the kitchen is in a converted school bus slapped onto the back — was tasty, cheap and authentic (I had tacos de carne asada and lengua) but nothing better than, say, La Reyna or El Paso (and not as cheap, either).
  • I don’t know if this one falls on Tampa or not, but Frankies, a hot dog place with a few locations in Connecticut and one in Tampa, served me the Worst. Cheesesteak. Ever. Instead of thinly sliced eye of round, it was some sort of shredded beef with Italian seasonings. Seriously, WTF.

A positive food note: I ate at Five Guys Burgers and Fries, a regional chain, and had the best burger I’ve had in a while. Greasy, thick, cheesy. And the fries, served overflowing from a white foam cup, were phenomenal. I keep looking for a excuse to go back. Maybe for lunch tomorrow. (Drool.)

Slaugther video

In the multimedia package I produced for my master’s, there’s a video of me killing a pig. It’s too long and pretty anticlimactic, but what’s interesting to me is, while I stand behind what I wrote, how different it is from the text about the same incident (which originally appeared on this blog). I wrote the piece as soon as I got home but didn’t edit the video for a few weeks.

On another note, it’s disappointing — though not surprising — that lots of meat eaters refuse to watch the slaughter. If you have issues watching a video, which you can start and stop at your leisure, in the privacy of your own home, you should probably rethink the whole eating dead animals thing.

I know some might find it vomit-inducing, but death is part of the bargain, right?