Food & Drink

Originally designed to preserve vegetables for extended lengths of time, the pickling process has been around since ancient times. Julius Caesar fed pickles to his troops to increase their stamina. Pickles were purported to be a part of Cleopatra’s beauty routine, and Shakespeare repeatedly mentioned them in his plays. Today you’ll find pickles…

After a couple of unsuccessful turns as Regions, the space at 6th Street and Mill Avenue in downtown Tempe is about to become a completely different concept, with a new owner. Restaurateur Julian Wright, who owns La Bocca Urban Pizzeria + Wine Bar a block up the street, is transforming…

Anyone that has searched the couch cushions for a handful of change knows that boozing on an extreme budget can be a risky proposition. To help you decide how to spend that meager pile of pennies, we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel to review some of the cheapest, most…

Bacon, the Old Town Scottsdale breakfast joint run by the Devil’s Martini folks, is no more. A “For Lease” sign went up at the Goldwater Boulevard space over the weekend. Bacon opened in the spring of ’09, and never quite took off. Good breakfast spots are always in demand –…

Remember in early June, when I reported on the closing of Sucker Punch Sally’s? The official word at that time was that the restaurant was only temporarily closed, due to air conditioning problems, and that it would reopen in September. It struck me as odd that an almost brand-new restaurant would…

Word spread like wildfire yesterday about Hillside Spot’s fire — seems like a lot of people wanted to hit it up for Sunday breakfast — but the blaze itself was brief and well contained. Yesterday morning, a spark from the rotisserie at the Ahwatukee restaurant created a fire in the hood…

[jump] Also delicious were pastry chef Renee Cade’s trio of passion fruit mousse with vanilla bean bavarois, pistachio cake with citrusy Grand Marnier cream and adorable little cast iron stove loaded with salt caramels and handmade marshmallows. Because Cade’s now taken over all of the sweets at elements, regulars will have to say goodbye to Chef…

Iron Chef Michael Symon breaks out of Kitchen Stadium this Thursday with his new show on The Cooking Channel, Cook Like an Iron Chef. Symon, who owns Lola, Lolita, Bar Symon, and the B Spot restaurants in Northeast Ohio, as well as Roast in Detroit, says the show is for…

Fans of Monster Energy drinks are in for both disappointment and surprise with the Monster Energy Shooters. We’re big fans of the 16-ounce regular Monsters, which taste like carbonated apple juice to us, but the Monster Hitman Energy Shooter was…well, a whole different monster. The shooter bottles are smaller (just…

Recently we came across a drinking game called “Louisville Slugger.” To play, one drinks a can of beer as fast as possible while a partner counts the seconds. For every second, the drinker must revolve around a baseball bat held steady against the ground. Then the drinker must pick up…

My blog posts might be a hell of a lot funnier if I wrote them as letters to myself, and then snarkily responded to them.Or not.Because this is what writer Todd Daniel does on his hysterical new diet blog, Fat or Fiction, and I promise you, the guy doesn’t need a…

​​The average person’s stomach can hold about a liter of food, or close to two pounds’ worth. But who wants to be average? All over town, restaurants are offering up contests of confection, defying brave eaters to ingest more food than they should eat in a week — daily recommended…