Less than an hour into our survey of the sprawling Scottsdale party palace Barcelona, and already Jett’s bent over with a black gent’s teeth in her pretty posterior. And sadly, that black gent ain’t me. It’s tamer than it sounds. The ambisexual Giselle of the PHX still has her jeans…
Florida native Steven Rogers honed his nightclub skills in Manhattan, during the reign of Studio 54, and celebrity restaurateur Mr. Chow, for whom he worked. He rubbed shoulders with the likes of Truman Capote, Mick and Bianca Jagger, and Lauren Bacall, while doing lighting for Gotham clubs. Then he said…
Vivacious, witty, and easy on the eyes. Such is the appeal of Justina Duong, 31, owner of Cyclo, Chandler’s kudos-laden Vietnamese eatery, a culinary lodestone for Valley foodies. You can add smart to her list of attributes. Duong attended USC on scholarship, acquiring a degree in pharmacy. But after a…
Bullfighter and backpacker Carlos Manriquez, 33, is the chef and co-owner of two critically acclaimed Valley eateries: Scottsdale’s Atlas Bistro, and Mucho Gusto Taqueria and Mexican Bistro in Tempe. Raised in Mexicali, Mexico, Manriquez has a degree in dairy husbandry from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He came to Arizona…
Phoenix has been very, very good for 28-year-old JX3. The Power 92.3 DJ moved from Denver to Phoenix to study meteorology at Arizona State University. Eventually, this gregarious young gent began MCing local club events, where he was spotted by Power program director Bruce St. James. Four years later, the…
I have been to the mountaintop, and, yes, I’ve eaten it, because that’s just the kind of guy I am. The edible pinnacle of which I speak is as formidable as Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano, and while devouring it, I felt like the food-critic equivalent of some intrepid mountaineer determined to…
It’s sometime between 11 and midnight, and I’m seated at the bar of the “air patio” at e4 (www.e4-az.com), Scottsdale’s new epicenter of wickedness, a Vegas-style nightclub with four theme rooms based on the elements: fire, water, air and earth. Next to me is the devil in the flesh herself,…
Unless you have a tongue made of cast iron and a mouth lined with ceramic tiles, the clear noodle salad at Sala Thai Restaurant on 32nd Street, a quarter-mile north of Shea Boulevard, should set your gob ablaze like Los Angeles during the riots, and that’s at the “medium” level…
Are all restaurant chains doomed to suck eggs like Old Yeller? Not necessarily. It’s hard to find fault with a Chambord margarita from Z’Tejas, for instance. And I do occasionally get a craving for an In-N-Out burger or a roast beef sammy from Arby’s. Don’t even get me started on…
FRI 9/16The Prince of Motherfucking Darkness: That’s the literary epithet that author John Gilmore has earned after a lifetime spent excavating the noirish underbelly of human existence. From his grim account of Charles Schmid, the homicidal “Pied Piper of Tucson,” in Cold-Blooded, to his mortician-like dissection of Charles Manson’s psyche…
“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!” I cry as I ease our whip a block south of the downtown Phoenix arts venue .anti_space at 815 West Madison Street. “It looks like a freakin’ Rob Zombie flick down here.” “Oh, Kreme, they’re just crackheads,” sputters the J-unit, pooh-poohing my dismay at…
Maybe it was watching Tommy Lee get tutored by that hot blonde in Tommy Lee Goes to College that inspired us. Or maybe it was just cruising through Tempe the other day and noticing that all the fly Arizona State University chicks are back for fall. Or perhaps we were…
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: That’s what — poof — appears in my cranium like a two-bit magician behind a puff of smoke as I walk back to my car from Vu, chef William Bradley’s chichi, yearling eatery over at the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale at Gainey Ranch. There’s one…
My nostrils are so filled with the stink of keister-kissing by the other restaurant critics in this city that I long for nothing more than the hide of an overrated grub purveyor. Throughout greater Phoenix, there are plenty of culinary dinosaurs, as well as new bistros, in need of a…
“There’s more white cloth in here than a Klan meetin’ in Georgia!” I spit as we cross the threshold of Old Town Scottsdale’s Dos Gringos for the club’s toga party last Thursday. “So, uh, how do I look?” “Like someone tried to tie a tablecloth around a hippo,” cracks my…
The most superlative pizza I’ve ever scarfed was from storefront pizzerias in Manhattan and Brooklyn, usually after stumbling out of some tavern. But even when I was sober as the dreaded parson, pizza was the grub that kept me going in Gotham. And nothing that I’ve tasted outside the Five…
“First off, no pullin’ out your ‘man,'” Mr. Luscious informs his fellow male strippers, minutes before they take to the Celebrity Theatre’s stage as the erotic revue known as The Main Event, Part 2. “You can act like you’re about to pull it out, but you better not.” “In case…
The only deity I’ve ever had a personal affinity for is that corpulent, jolly “buddha” with a small “b” known as Jin Foo, Bu Dai, or Hotei, depending on whom you ask. Personally, Gautama Buddha, he of the Bodhi tree fame, always struck me as a bit too severe, like…
The quarter-mile drag-racing track at Speedworld Raceway Park is sticky from burnt tires, and exhaust fills our lungs like we’ve been puffin’ Pall Malls all day. Cars and motorcycles are lined up in pairs from the beginning of the two-lane blacktop, way back past the chain-link entrance, just like that…
Flan is one of those desserts people pooh-pooh, as if its production seems too simple, or its presence in a Southwestern town like ours too prevalent. But take it from a flan-obsessed gourmand like myself: Good flan ain’t easy to find. Like tiramisu in Italian eateries, flan is often written…
I’m at a sushi bar the other day, waiting for the chef to finish up some toro nigiri for me, when I decide to pay the raw-fish maestro a compliment. I praise the swank new restaurant he works in, and comment that the sushi has improved since it first opened…
I’m in the back of Louis XIV’s tour bus as the San Diego group’s front man Jason Hill is knocking out a new composition on acoustic guitar on the couch next to me, something with the refrain, “I don’t want to be a fool no more.” I wait politely for…
