It is not Christmas at Royal India. Crouched on the edge of the commercial sprawl that is Henrietta, Royal India sits apart from the celebration of America’s No. 1 consumer holiday, an oasis in a desert of faux holiday cheer. Mommy is not kissing Santa Claus here. Nor is anyone bemoaning giving their heart away […]
James Leach
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DINING REVIEW: Victoire
Rochester has needed a good Belgian beer bar for at least a decade — which, coincidentally, is almost exactly the amount of time that I’ve lived here. Despite the excellent beer bars and microbreweries that have bred like rabbits across the region in recent years, the lack of a true Belgian joint has been a […]
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DINING REVIEW: Good Smoke BBQ
Around this time of year, I tend to pull my dog-eared copy of H.P. Lovecraft’s collected stories off the shelf, looking for something to send a chill up my spine. The plot of every one of the old hack’s stories is the same: some deeply troubled soul trying to warn an unsuspecting world of the […]
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DINING REVIEW: Pleased to meat you
It’s a chilly Wednesday evening in early October. The sheds at the Rochester Public Market are vacant, a brisk wind chasing bits of paper and leaves around the wide-open space. On the edges of the market, warehouses, brooding ramparts of industrial-grey concrete and steel rolling doors, stand shuttered and dead under the glare of security […]
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DINING REVIEW: Thai Lao
Sweat breaks across my forehead. My eyes tear up. My nose is running. And I swear that my ears are ringing. I’ve only scooped one or two tangles of bright white rice noodles from the bowl of lava-red broth in front of me and I’m already in agony — the good kind of agony. The […]
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DINING REVIEW: Delish Bakery
There’s a stretch of Park Avenue, roughly between Goodman and Oxford, that might be considered a sort of pan-European hideaway. Roam Café, with its vaguely Italian theme and its ardently Italian Vespas, holds down the spot at 260 Park. The dearly departed but not forgotten Dutch Market used to occupy the house across the avenue […]
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Pack Your Lunch
Just in time for back to school, James Leach looks at some grown-up alternatives to the boxed lunch, including Japanese bento boxes.
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The new reliable
“Reliable.” In a hyperbolic age when anything short of hosanas and accolades is the equivalent of damnation, reliable has become a dirty word. It’s not. Reliable, along with other disfavored words like “steady,” “dependable,” and “workmanlike,” are strong, noble words, describing people who work hard, deliver what they say they will deliver, and do it consistently day after day.
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Spoon fed
Eight hours. That’s how long it took Chhaya En, the owner and chef The Soup Spoon in Victor, to make the broth that fills the bowl in front of me. Eight hours of intense labor, starting with not much more than beef bones, vegetables, and water, and ending with a soup that is richly fragrant […]
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Taverna for the green
Rochester has waited a long time for a Greek restaurant. That’s not to say that we don’t have excellent restaurants that are Greek-ish — broadly Mediterranean places that offer Greek food alongside other dishes that are more Middle Eastern in origin, like falafel or tabouli or pita bread, for that matter.
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Putting China back in Chinese food
In 2009, Chef San Lee made a clean break with the past, closing his successful restaurant China Garden in Henrietta and, as his son Brandon put it, “taking a break” from more than 30 years of restaurant cooking. The chef took a vacation and started to consider what he wanted to do next. The elder […]
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A taste of Chinatown
Those who dined at South City Garden won’t notice any significant changes in the interior of White Swans. The dining room still has a vaguely Miami nightclub-café sort of feel to it, with a smattering of Chinese figurines — dragons, a laughing Buddha, a frog with coins in its mouth — and bamboo plants scattered […]
