Once upon a time, a while ago, there was a local bar. It was well-worn, but it wasn’t a dive at all, very friends-as-family oriented, largely on account of the manager. The manager was a lovely man, and he elevated this thirst parlor to an bona fide third place by…

Everyone can make whatever food they want. They can call the food whatever they want, and, largely, they can sell it to whoever they want, however they want. Having said that, elevated garbage plates are a terrible, terrible idea. Some restaurant people with a natural wine background are opening a…

A movie starts in a sad little town, run by bad little people. Then there is a visitor to the town , a mysterious stranger. The stranger somehow upsets the order of the sad little town, and gets roughed up for his troubles. Whereupon stranger absolutely kicks everyone’s ass and…

So lemme tell my little Bourdain story, the least of all the Bourdain stories, anyway. I only saw him once. It was five years or so ago, some sort of fundraiser, a good-guy fundraiser, and Bourdain was the guest of honor. It was the kind of deal where all these…

It turns out that 48 hours is enough time to run any subject of contention into the ground. But at the risk of impertinence, the most galling aspect of Kathy Griffin’s autodefenstration with a fake severed head doused in raspberry jam is not that thing those people you disagree with…

In yesterday’s pundit-lauded joint address to Congress, President Donald J. Trump set the tone by addressing the current national backdrop of threats and aggression against non-Caucasian citizens: Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that…

And now he’s dead. — Yesterday long-time New York City reporter Wayne Barrett died in Manhattan at the age of 71. Barrett’s 27-year stint writing for The Village Voice, eventually taking over the Runnin’ Scared column, which was a beat devoted exclusively to muck-raking in its most elemental form, was one of the greatest runs…

In my other life, I’m a weird historian. — Before I ever learned history, I learned that there were histories that were rumored to exist behind them. I grew up during the Reagan Administration, and that was a very special time for not ever being trustful of what was actually going on. This was true even without searching out…

Specifically the northbound corridor just south of D.C. — Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse! The months-long season that immediately precedes the Super Bowl — the season of fellowship and arguing about whether “Die Hard” is a holiday movie — is upon us. …