La Residence 202 West Rosemary Street Downtown Chapel Hill Website Entrees: $19-29 La Residence is a cozy, fine dining establishment that specializes on local food with a French influence. They’ve been around since 1976 and plenty of family work here, even when they are just in town for vacation. The service was a wee bit
Read more

Wine: Sterling Vintner’s Collection Zinfandel 2006 Region: Central Coast, CA My apologies for the lack of a picture. Oops. Guess I was too busy drinking! This is a dry wine, with notes of tobacco, soft orange, and chocolate.  I can’t complain about it but I can’t endorse it, either. I had hoped for more. Other
Read more

Wine: Alice White Shiraz 2006 Region: Southeastern Australia Nose: Candied cherry and chocolates. Taste: Bright, ripe cherries and semisweet chocolate, which surprises me as a lot of the wines I’ve tried lately have had noses that vastly diverge from their tastes. This is a medium-bodied wine, mildly tannic, and overly pleasant. It’s easy to enjoy
Read more

Thus begins my Southern Fast Food series. I was convinced by my friends, Iris and Laura, or perhaps by the fruity rum cocktails I’d been drinking, that I needed to give the chains located in my present state of residence a shot. This was after I had proclaimed loudly and proudly to have never stepped
Read more

Margarita Torero’s 15-501 and Garrett Road, Durham Website Torero’s house margarita comes in four sizes: regular, macho, grande, and gigante.  This is a regular size glass: Believe me, the gigante glass was terrifying to behold. Torero’s makes their own margarita mix and on first sip, it was sweet, and I feared too much so. Subsequent
Read more

Mazu, our five-month-old kitten, has four goals in life: 1) Convert house plants into litter boxes, 2) Rush out the front door, 3) Pretend I’m a tree, and 4) Defeat the monster in the water bowl. It’s a Petmate water fountain and the motor makes sucking noises whenever the water gets low. To Mazu, these
Read more

Dillard’s Bar-B-Q 3921 Fayetteville Street Durham Website Open Tuesday through Saturday From $3.75 for a bar-b-q sandwich to $10.99 for seafood gumbo. My entrée with two sides and hush puppies was $4.99 at lunch. I finally stopped in at the bright yellow and red restaurant that always catches my eye while driving down Fayetteville. You
Read more

Expect my blog posts to continue being a bit sporadic until the new year — we are headed out of town to visit friends and family in LA in a week, so while I hope to keep up posts, I’m not hitting quite as many restaurants lately due to lack of time!  I do plan
Read more

Café Capistrano *CLOSED* 2250 Gathering Park Circle Carpenter Village, Cary Website Entrees: $10-16 I’d heard good reviews from some friends who live in Cary and Morrisville about Café Capistrano and one of those friends took me out to dinner there to thank me for editing her dissertation. It’s hidden away in the Carpenter Village development,
Read more

Wine: Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2006 Region: Italy Leather says hello as I take a whiff of this wine. There’s a dark, rich cherry smell as well.   It tastes strongly of leather and leaves me with an impression of a smoke-filled car. It’s very dry and somewhat sour, sucking away the moisture in my mouth and
Read more