Thoughtful Gourmet Blog

Field Notes is my monthly column where I share a few of the events and other items of note taking place in any given month. These are just a few of the food and food-adjacent events that have caught my attention in December. This column will be updated.

For my 2025 gift guide for food lovers and eaters, I sourced foods and food gift boxes from the West Coast, with one exception.

As I researched the 25 cookbooks included here, a singular theme arose: Food as touchstone to bring together generations across culture, geography and dislocation. Food as shared heritage, no matter your background. Food as identity.

Here are just a few restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area (and beyond) I visited in October. Borscht Cocktail (it’s true!), the biggest schnitzel you’ve ever seen (also true) and a tamale worth traveling for…

Field Notes is my monthly column where I share a few of the events and other items of note taking place in any given month. These are just a few of the food and food-adjacent events that have caught my attention in November.

Nite Yun, the owner of Lunette in San Francisco dishes on the ancestral food of Kampuchea (known in English as Cambodia) in My Cambodia. Yun pulls a thread through the dishes of her youth in Stockton, California, through her travels in Cambodia, from her first restaurant, Nyum Bai, with sweets inspired by SoCal’s Khmer doughnut shops.

Tonic has splashed out, emerging as a go-to flavor for mixologists to craft pleasantly refreshing non-alcoholic cocktails. It’s distinctive bitter flavor used to be paired almost exclusively with gin – the better to balance all of those botanicals, my dear. More recently, non-alcoholic (or “NA”) cocktails are all the rage…

The owner of Roy’s Koji BBQ truck reflects on his tao of cooking in “The Choi of Cooking.” The joy in the title references an earlier instructive cookbook, but in Choi’s capable hands, “joy” becomes “Choi” and life is even more delicious for the effort.