I wanted my 200th restaurant review to be of a solid restaurant. As an avid reader and contributor to the Hungry Onion message board, I have noticed a love affair with a particular Chinese restaurant. That place is Sichuan Cottage in Marlboro. While the board is a place for debate over dining, there seems to…
Tag: Spicy
Photo of the Day: July 22, 2018
I wanted to give the cold Indian dish Bhel Puri a try. I took leftover basmati rice and some crispy Indian snacks from an event I attended and mixed them up with some homemade spicy onion chutney. The result was incredibly similar to what I have had in restaurants. I was proud of myself.
Photo of the Day: June 26, 2018
A slightly odd but delicious dish from Little Szechuan: chicken tossed in a spicy sauce with peanuts, edamame, cucumbers, and water chestnuts. It could have done without the cucumbers, as I am not a fan and the menu did not list them, but no big deal as I removed them. The textures present here were…
Restaurant Review: Edison Noodle House (Edison, NJ)
It looked like a total dump on the outside. The picture I have of the place in the sidebar of this article does not do it justice. As it happens, moments before we ended up walking into the Edison Noodle House, I had remarked that we needed to find a hole-in-the-wall, authentic, dumpy-looking place. That’s…
Photo of the Day: June 3, 2018
Back-to-Back spicy shrimp dishes featured in the Photo of the Day column. This is named (simply enough) “Hot and Spicy” Shrimp, from UJ’s Asian Bistro. It had wonderful flavor, but despite the sinister look with all those chili flakes, really failed to deliver on the heat.
Photo of the Day: June 2, 2018
There are dishes that change your life. This would be one of them. Camarones ala Diablo is a fiery, rich dish containing about a dozen shrimp in a blistering sauce. The ingredients, as told to me by the owner of Los Corrales herself, are simple enough, but the complexity that follows sends you into a…
Photo of the Day: May 22, 2018
A homemade Shrimp Etouffee when I was on a Creole kick a while back. It was pretty good if I don’t say so myself.
Restaurant Review: Temple (Red Bank, NJ)
My friend Justin and I were originally going to a food truck festival in Keansburg today. Because of how hot and humid it was, we then decided to go to an actual restaurant instead. Somewhere. Anywhere. We ended up in Red Bank and felt like Chinese. Having passed Temple many times and heard decent reviews,…
Photo of the Day: May 2, 2018
Jose Tejas has an incredibly cheap menu that they churn out with lightning-quick speed. For that reason, I think the actual quality of their food often goes unnoticed. These are incredibly well-executed fish tacos, consisting of grilled swordfish, a spicy mango salsa, and an interesting grilled avocado. I cannot say that I have had better…
Photo of the Day: April 18, 2018
Me taking a momentary break from some insanely spicy sauce at Los Corrales in Keyport.
The Dinner that was Closure
As you all know, my dad passed away in June. On Father’s Day, of all days. Without going into too much detail, it took from that moment until late November for my mom and I to know if we would be able to keep the house, my childhood home for 23 years, or not. When…
Restaurant Review: Little Szechuan (Little Silver, NJ)
There is a fine line between nostalgic and dated. Any restaurant that can manage to walk that line and succeed is okay in my book. I’ve written numerous times about restaurants such as Little Szechuan—places that are stuck in the time they were built. When it comes to actual sit-down Chinese restaurants, there are few…
