Gastronomy

Heathrow Airport is a city in miniature, with around 200,000 travelers coursing through its concourses daily between arrivals and departures, ferried across terminals via buses and trams. Clusters of restaurants and shops form the reservoirs into which those freshly scanned and vetted by security are injected, to mill and

A Helsinki Dérive, Part Three The Metro ride from Kamppi to Itäkeskus takes less than twenty minutes, but it’s long enough to feel yourself being pulled into suburbia. We navigate our way out of the subway station, more by random luck than any smartphone guidance, and eventually I'

A Helsinki Dérive, Part Two On my third full day in Helsinki, I find myself on the second floor of Piilo café, perched over a slice of quiche and a coffee, still suspended in the haze of caffeine and jet lag. The chatter all around me washes together into a

A Helsinki Dérive, Part One A “world traveler” is the last thing I’d call myself, yet I find myself occupying a table at Hakaniemen Kauppahalli in Helsinki, attempting to tame hunger pangs and jet lag with a Pepsi Max and an apple-filled Munkki, the Finnish donut isotope, while questioning

Let’s hear it for the local and unfranchised! Portland’s got no shortage of pizza joints, but we’ll always root for the little guys next to the dive bar. Cutie Pie Pizzeria recently set up their ovens next door to the Mad Hanna, our neighborhood watering hole, and

A life skill one picks up in college is surviving on pasta (or ramen, but that’s another story). Unfortunately, this has the side effect of making Italian food seem prosaic. Spaghetti with "meat" sauce becomes a culinary punchline. Eventually, you graduate to “fancier” options—chain restaurants cloaked

Mexican Food, Market Contradictions, and the Sacred Labor of Memory Mexican food in the United States has never been just one thing. It is pre-Columbian agriculture, colonial rupture, Catholic ritual, borderland invention, migrant labor, corporate abstraction. It is memory folded into masa, and it is melted cheese on a combo

We’ve lived in the neighborhood nearly a decade and have seen this corner go through many identities—brewpubs, fusion experiments—but Paqui feels like a genuine arrival. It’s not trying to dazzle with reinvention or nostalgia. Instead, it offers something more rare: memory rendered with clarity and care.