Lagerfields Micropub, 12601 North Paradise Village Parkway, Phoenix, 765-0059. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday and Monday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Want to cool off this monsoon season? Going to San Diego is always an option. But not too many of us…
Commode to Joy: Being a restaurant critic isn’t always a delight. But after almost six years of eating out four or five times a week, I can take the downs with the ups. Overpriced meals? Bad food? Surly servers? I’ve seen them all. One thing I still haven’t gotten used…
Guest Columnists Nobody likes to get stood up, and restaurant owners are no different. But when our customers don’t honor their reservations, more than just our feelings get hurt. Of course, there’s a significant financial loss–one restaurant claims it lost $1 million because of no-shows in a single year. More…
Caffe Boa, 5063 East Elliot, Ahwatukee, 893-3331. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Why do people confuse money with class? Ted Kennedy and Fife Symington, for instance, are both dripping with wealth, acknowledged or not. But…
Magic Chef: It’s easy to get stale after you’ve been at a job for some time. Believe it or not, there are actually some Mondays when I don’t bound out of bed, race happily to a blank computer screen and try to meet a Friday deadline. It’s no different for…
Korean Restaurant, 1414 North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale, 994-5995. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Wednesday, 5 to 10 p.m. These are the times that try men’s Seouls. The Valley’s Asian community is growing at a phenomenal rate. Chinese, Japanese, Thai and…
Over and Haute: A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran an intriguing piece on the declining significance of French cuisine, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” Author Adam Gopnik discovered, to his horror, that the French are no longer on the cutting edge of gastronomy. Instead, they seem…
Eat the High Country: The Valley isn’t the only area of Arizona exploding with restaurants. The Sedona/Flagstaff region (see this week’s Cafe column) is also booming. One reader has alerted me to a couple of offbeat restaurants that local weekend travelers may want to try. The first, in Flagstaff, is…
Dahl & Di Luca, 2321 West Highway 89A, Sedona, 1-520-282-5219. Hours: Dinner, 5 p.m. to close, seven nights a week. This is not a pleasant time of year to live in the Valley of the Perpetual Sun, unless you’re a lizard or a water-park operator. For the next several months,…
Deja Revu: It’s rerun time on television, so I thought this might be a good time to do some restaurant-food reruns, too. I returned to several places I’d enjoyed in the past to see if they still lived up to my plaudits. These three do: Centro Cafe & Bakery, 15820…
Sir Charles Bar-B-Q Pit, 1231 East Northern, Phoenix, 997-6663. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Civilization has done a good job suppressing most of our basic, primitive urges. We modern men and women don’t satisfy our…
Bistro Panino, 4139 West Bell, Phoenix, 978-8500. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, Monday through Thursday, 4:30 to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 4:30 to 9:30 p.m. Not too many years ago, there were only two plausible explanations for venturing west of Central Avenue in…
Word Is Out: Some restaurant critics, I suppose, know everything. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I have a shelf full of reference works to help me overcome my ignorance. The latest aid: Webster’s New World Dictionary of Culinary Arts, compiled by Steven Labensky, Gaye Ingram and Sarah Labensky (Prentice…
Inn Crowd: It’s not easy to put your finger on just what it is that boosts a very good restaurant into the ranks of the very best. But whatever it is, it appears to be happening at Lon’s. The exceptional meal I had here left me transfixed with admiration for…
Welcome to the New Times Cafe swimsuit issue. Unfortunately, the editors have nixed my suggestion to run a photo spread of me and several models lolling on a breezy, sun-dappled tropical-island paradise, cavorting in designer bathing suits. How could they be so shortsighted? Right about now, most of us start…
Bravo Bistro, 4327 North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale, 481-7614. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; Dinner, Sunday through Wednesday, 5 to 10 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 5 p.m. to midnight. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what…
Caribbean Cruise: You don’t often see the words “Scottsdale” and “bargain dining” in the same sentence. But to my happy surprise, I ran across an offbeat new place that not only dishes out wonderful food, but also gives you plenty of change back from a tenspot. It’s Caribbean Grill, a…
C-Fu Gourmet, 2051 West Warner, Chandler, 899-3888. Hours: Dim sum, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week. “M” is for the million neuroses she gave me. “O” means that her act is getting old. “T” is for time I spend in therapy. “H” is for her heart not…
Brunch Cost Ratio: Everyone knows there isn’t always a correlation between price and value. Is a Lexus three times better than a Camry? Maybe, but only if you’re trying to impress an adolescent valet parker. Is a first-class ticket worth five times the cost of a discounted coach fare on…
Coup Des Tartes, 4626 North 16th Street, Phoenix, 212-1082. Hours: Lunch, Thursday through Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, Thursday through Tuesday, 5:30 to 10 p.m. During its 1995 session, having solved all of Arizona’s educational, tax, crime, transportation, air pollution, health-care and welfare problems, the state Legislature turned…
Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport: Not too many years ago, Valley wine merchants used a simple system to display their inventory: On one set of shelves sat the wines with corks; on another sat the wines with screw caps. Well, the town’s become a lot more sophisticated, but apparently I…
Harris’, 3101 East Camelback, Phoenix, 508-8888. Hours: Lunch, Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Dinner, 5:30 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Is Phoenix ready for more prime time? The operators of two new steak houses, featuring pricey, top-of-the-line, prime-graded beef, certainly think so. They’ve recently set…
