Editor’s note: Chow Bella usually gives bylines, so why the big secret about who writes Waiter Confidential? Well, consider all the toes that Anonymous could step on. This industry pro has seen it all in 25 years of waiting tables and tending bar at some of the Valley’s most beloved…
From indie restaurants to indie rock, my tastes are all about the little guy. I come from an entrepreneurial family, and I know a lot of small-business owners. And if given a choice, I prefer to stay in quirky little hotels when I travel. So it goes without saying that…
Regular Chow Bella readers should easily be able to rattle off names of Phoenix’s elite chefs like Eddie Matney and Michael de Maria, but according to the O’Neil Associates/ASBA Arizona Economic Indicators Monitor, the average joe on the street has no idea. Three thousand local businesses were asked to voice…
My new favorite at Sam’s Cafe. Loyalty is not my strong suit. I like to try new places and new things; ask me what my favorite restaurant is, and it’s probably one that opened last week. But with the economy collapsing, the newspaper industry in a particularly awful place,…
Normally the tasting team and I go in to these pop culture reviews on essentially equal footing, none of us terribly familiar with the product at hand. This time I threw the tasters — Jonathan, Jasmine, Peter and Jay — a bit of a curve ball, serving up one of my all-time favorite sodas, Wal-mart’s…
Johnny Chu is locked out of Fate, the downtown Asian restaurant he created six years ago. Longstanding disagreements between him and partner/landlord Norman Fox boiled over last Wednesday afternoon, when Chu says he discovered that Fox had changed all the locks on Fate and Next Door, and obtained a restraining order…
Monday Night Martha has its roots a couple years back, in a now-defunct book club. The book club had been around for years — members had come and gone — and the thing really was on its last leg, when we decided (well, I decided — it was my pick that…
This news is bad enough to make any chocoholic ache with disappointment: Chatham Kitz, owner of Chatham’s Fine Chocolates, says he’ll be permanently closing the doors of his wonderful Camelback Road chocolate boutique by the end of this month. “We’ll be open ’til we sell all of our inventory, and that’s it,”…
Rumor has it that there’s been a split between Fate chef Johnny Chu (who recently opened Sens, the sake bar that I just reviewed) and owner/landlord Norman Fox, and that one of the key players involved in the restaurant has taken the liquor license. From the looks of the sign…
The first time I ever made coffee in my life, I almost killed somebody. It was my sophomore year in high school, and I was the “singer” in a punk/metal band called Legion of the Dead. The guitarist asked me to make coffee at practice one day, and, never having made coffee and with no frame of reference, I filled the coffee filter to the hilt with coffee grounds. The guitarist took one sip of the black brew and gasped. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Eddie Matney Chef Eddie Matney is the owner of Eddie’s House in Scottsdale…
When I heard about Schreiner’s Fine Sausage — a family-owned business that’s provided Phoenix with fine meats since 1955 — I was ecstatic. As I approached the unassuming red-and-white building with retro-looking signs on Seventh Street, I felt like I was on a school field trip. Once inside, I gazed with salivating wonder at all the homemade meats in the deli case and fired off questions with carnivorous enthusiasm: “Is the Cajun Boudin sausage beef and pork?”; “Do you make your own veal loaf?”; “How spicy is the Jalapeno cheese sausage?” (The answers: No, yes, and not very).
David Johnson has wine on the brain. Why not? It runs in the family. He can trace his familial roots in the wine and spirits business back to 17th century Jacobite revolutionaries. As a sommelier in training, he spent years in Europe, honing both his palate and his craft. Now…
No, I’m not going to flash you my bum despite the headline up there. It’s much too cold out for that. Haven’t you heard that Winter is upon us? Naturally that means Christmas has come early in the form of the next round of seasonals. Today we’ll be looking at Full…
You’ve heard it before: Spend your hard-earned cash at local businesses, and that money will benefit your community a lot more than if you’d blown it at a national retailer or a chain restaurant. But there’s nothing wrong with a little reminder this time of year, when there’s too much shopping to…
I didn’t plan my Thanksgiving very well. The missus and I were due at the palatial Scottsdale estate of a distant cousin at 4, but it was 1 and we were starving and had no food in the house. We’d been foraging for an open restaurant in central Phoenix for…
Talk about filling a niche. When it comes to Asian food in downtown Phoenix, the offerings are definitely sparse, but now there’s a new restaurant that takes the scene a big leap in the right direction, catering to diners’ culinary wanderlust with Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese dishes. I’m talking…
Four of us — my sister-in-law and my brother and my dad — had just decided on pizza for lunch when another brother piped up. “Pizza?? I have a sore throat! I can’t eat pizza.” This is life in the Fenske family. There is never consensus. Nothing can ever…
As a pop-head, I’m not exaggerating when I say that one my favorite things about living in Phoenix is the availability of Mexican sodas. Mexicans are the only people who drink more soda per capita than Americans, and they have a truly amazing array of flavors: usually fruity, a little…
To raise money for the Chaparral High School Band, the three-day-old Scottsdale location of Jersey Mike’s is offering free regular subs to customers who donate $1, from December 3 through 7. Located at 10392 N. Scottsdale Road in Scottsdale (480-992-6493), it’s the third Arizona location for the East Coast-style sandwich…
They had me at “country-fried” steak. A friend tipped me off to The Breakfast Joynt, a new, independently owned restaurant that just opened two weeks ago in north Scottsdale, and the menu of made-from-scratch fare looks tasty. Along with country-fried steak and eggs, there’s biscuits and gravy, stuffed apple pancakes…
Amy Silverman and I wondered that as we tried to figure out a time to hang out and catch up amid the stress of work, personal obligations, and the holidays. Then we realized that if we tag-teamed some holiday cooking — over Thai takeout and drinks, chez Amy — we’d get our…
